Aboriginal Science Fiction #09v02n03 (1988 03 04)

Books
By Darrell
Editor’s Notes
By Charles C.
Bookshelf
By Janice M. Eisen
Boomerangs
Our readers
Our Renewal
Aborigines
By Laurel Lucas
Cartoon

By Jerry Workman
Our Alien Publisher
By a crazy alien

Poetry

All Creatures Great And Small
By Elissa Malcohn
From A New World
By Bonita Kale

Stories

When the Stranger Comes
By Paul A. Gilster
Art by Larry Blamire

Page 14

Page 30

45
Page 52

Page 56
Page 58

Page 19

Contents

Page 4

To Be An Auk
By Elaine Radford
Art by David R. Deitrick

Sunshine Delight
By Paul Edwards
Art by Leslie Pardew

Impact
By Ben Bova
Art by Bob Eggleton

Birthplace
By Chris Boyce
Art by Pat Morrissey

Advertisements

Donning Starblaze: Thieves World
Aboriginal Science Fiction
Science Fiction Chronicle
ABO Back Issues
A Long Time Ago
Classifieds

The Pat Morrissey Pro ject
The ABO Art Gallery
The ABO Art Gallery

Page 9

Page 3
Page 7
Page 18
Page 39
Page 53
Page 55
Page 61
Page 61
Page 64

Staff

EDITOR
Charles C. Ryan
PUBLISHER
A crazy alien

ASSISTANT EDITORS
Daniel D. Kennedy
Laurel Lucas
Janice M. Eisen
Floyd Kemske
Mary C. Ryan
Kathy Romer
Ken Meltsner

ADVERTISING
Mary Perry

TYPESETTER
Joan Gaffney

GOFERS
Charles E. Ryan
Thomas S. Ryan

Aboriginal Science Fiction (ISSN
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1988 Aboriginal Science Fiction and

PAGE 2

individually copyrighted by the
authors and artists who have con-
tributed to this issue, Volume 2,
Number 3, whole copy Number 9,
published in March 1988.

Aboriginal Science Fiction wel-
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March/April 1988

comes letters to the editor. All letters
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PAGE 3

When the Stranger Comes

By Paul A. Gilster

Art by Larry Blamire

Things change their shapes in the northwest fjord
country. Jon Stefansson knew this was true, but it was
not something you talked about. Jon still remembered
the sheep shrieking in their pen that night long ago. He
and his father rushed out to find three of the creatures
gutted, their entrails smoking in the icy twilight. What
kind of animal could do that, so quiet, so quick?

Something that could change its shape at will,
thought Jon. Something that was no longer there when
you came running with the rifle. Something that left
no tracks.

Jon lay in the darkness, listening to the wind as it
fingered the walls of the house. Winter was early this
year. The radio said low pressure was deepening over
the Greenland Sea, and snow squalls already pelted
the coast. Soon they would sweep inland. The wind
would be inside the house then, pushing its way
through the chinks in the stone. By tomorrow, snow
would choke the passes and nothing human would
move on the packed crust.

The house was not the same with the boy here. Jon
had opened the door that evening to find his huge
shape filling the doorway. He wore a two-week growth
of beard, a green military jacket, hair that fell to the
shoulders. His mouth was set in a wide grin, revealing
perfect, American teeth.

“Hi,” he said, breathing hard. “I’m sort of
caught.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, where
dark clouds had crept over the mountains to the east.

“Yes? What is it you want?” Jon dropped into an
English he hadn’t used for years.

“Well....” The boy grinned at him idiotically.

“There is a cabin for hikers in twenty kilometers,
along the road to Isafjordur. There is no place for you
here.”

Jon tried to push the door shut but found to his
amazement that the boy resisted him. A huge, red
hand came around the door. The grin stayed fixed.

“Really. I’m sorry. It’s the weather.”

And so it had begun. Jon wondered again if he
should have forced him away with the rifle. But the
wind was already moaning against the roof, and soon
afterward the first snow flakes appeared outside the
window. The boy might never have made it through
the passes.

I am no murderer, thought Jon.

He sat up in the bed in pre-dawn darkness. The
boy’s presence in the house was palpable. Jon could
hear him breathing (or was that the wind?).

PAGE 4

There had been no one else in the house since
Einar moved away. He and his brother had never been
close; Einar left the farm to go to Reykjavik when Jon
was just six. He sold clothes in a small shop on
Austurstraeti. The night before he left, Einar and his
father argued far into the night. A slap, a curse, a
slamming door — this was Jon’s memory of Einar.

Jon had only been to Reykjavik once, when his fa-
ther took him. He remembered broken sidewalks and
squat houses with flowers in the window boxes. His fa-
ther spent three days looking for work (a yearly ritu-
al), but everyone knew he was a drunkard and even
his cousin at the whaling station refused to hire him.
Giving up as always, he spent the weekend drinking in
their room at the boarding house and slept completely
through their final day in the city. Jon sat beside him
and watched the ships making their turn past Reyk-
janes for the open sea.

The boy was like an ulcer in the house, rendering
sleep impossible.

Jon had not known where to put the American.
The night was too cold to leave him in one of the out-
buildings with the sheep. There was only Einar’s
room, which Jon had converted to a study. Let him
sleep there, then. And on his way in the morning. What
was a hiker doing out at this time of year anyway?

“It’s only for the night,” the boy had said. “Hey,
I’m sorry about this. I wouldn’t ask, but it’s getting so
cold.”

Jon grunted. What did he expect? Winter was rag-
ing into the north Atlantic. Yes, it was cold.

What was worst was that the American wanted to
talk. Jon had heated the stew he made earlier in the
week, offering some to the boy.

“The name is Matthews,” he said, taking the bowl
from Jon and eyeing it critically. “Hal Matthews.”

Jon nodded, aware that he was being asked his
own name, and finding pleasure in not responding.
“You have chosen a very bad time of year to hike in
this country,” he said, going to the stove. He returned
with a cup of hot tea that steamed in the pale light. The
American was a hunched shape against the wall.

Matthews was from Connecticut. He told Jon
about going to school at Yale, and his decision to
forego graduate study for a year while he pondered his
future. It seemed to Jon that Americans spent their
lives in fruitless searches for what they already had.
They were a spoiled and foolish people.

“Your farm is a long way from anywhere,” Mat-

March/April 1988

SS

thews said, finishing the bowl of stew and getting up to
put it on the table. “Don’t you ever get lonely?”

Jon grunted. “This valley is my home. I grew up
here, along with my brother and father. Einar moved
away long ago. My father is dead.”

“But the isolation....”

Jon felt a flash of anger at the insistent Matthews.
He could see the reaction in the American’s face, and
realized that he had forgotten how to conceal his feel-
ings. That thought made him angrier still. Why should
he conceal them? This was his land, his home. He
would do as he chose.

“When you leave,” Jon said, “where will you go?
To Flateyri? Or on to Isafjordur? ”

Matthews studied him. “I don’t know.” He said it
with a certain caginess, as though deciding to play
Jon’s game and conceal as much as he could. “You
know, maybe I’ll wander around this area a while. I
could stay at that cabin you mentioned for a week or
so.”

“There is nothing to see here.”

But in Jon’s mind the stark shape of the Eagle’s
Beak rose against the sky. The mountain towered over
the valley from the north, the croft huddling at its
base. From its summit you could see the Arctic
Ocean.

“I’ve met a lot of people in these farmsteads up
here,” Matthews said. “They talk about going to
Reykjavik eventually. Like everybody goes there
sooner or later. So I mean, it’s funny to find someone
like you. I guess you’re sort of a throwback. The old
Iceland.”

“Reykjavik.” Jon said the word deliberately, let-
ting his distaste flavor the air. “Let them go there. Let
them go to hell.”

Matthews raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

“Do you know, Matthews, just after the war
started, a German submarine sailed into the harbor at
Reykjavik. Many Icelanders went to the dock to see
this U-boat. They were proud of themselves because
they threw stones at the boat. They thought they
taught the Germans a lesson about who their friends
were. Stupid. They did not see that the Germans won.
They brought the war with them. Soon the British
came, then the Americans, strutting about this land as
if they owned it. Germans, Americans, what did it
matter? The world had come in.”

The lamp was smoking badly now, its acrid stink
burning Jon’s eyes. Matthews sat in the darkness, a
shadow cowling his head. He looked like a figure of
Death that Jon had seen in the church at Husavik,
painted on an ancient, weathered panel.

“Like I came in,” Matthews said.

When he finally slept, Jon grew cold, colder than
he could ever remember being. His dreams congealed
into a cocoon of ice, trapping him at its core. He lay at
the top of the Eagle’s Beak. The valley shimmered in
moonlight below him, the croft and its outbuildings
ghostly shapes just beyond the ridge line. As he wat-
ched, yellow light from the distant windows refracted,
distorted by the hardening ice.

And so he dreamed, entombed, until a crash
brought him to his senses. It was the door, swinging
wildly with the wind. He rushed to it, finding the bolts
PAGE 6

undone, and footprints leading out into the night.
Something was moving on the ridge line above the
house, a black shape almost lost in the snow. Climbing
toward the Eagle’s Beak.

Jon made a pot of coffee, its chicory-laden scent
filling the air. While it perked on the stove, he tuned
the radio. The storm had unexpectedly turned north
during the night and was moving out to sea. By mid-
morning the snow would end. The passes through the
mountains remained open.

Jon cursed. The boy could have gone on last night.
There had been no reason for any of this to happen.

Pouring a cup of coffee, Jon pulled his chair close
to the kerosene heater and sat back to wait for Mat-
thews. He thought about the American in his green
jacket and thick boots going up the escarpment, but
the image wavered and refused to coalesce. Only the
shape of the Eagle’s Beak was clear to him, as it had
been that night forty years ago, silhouetted by the
moon.

The first winter of the war had been bitterly cold.
That night the wind hissed through the passes, driving
spikes of frigid air beneath the door and through the
battered frame of the window. The cries of the sheep
woke Jon an hour before dawn. He ran to the door and
drew the bolt as his father swore in the darkness,
fumbling for his boots and knocking over a chair.

“Get the gun,” his father said. “Something’s at
the sheep.”

When they ran through the snow to the out-
buildings, they found the sheep terrified but unharm-
ed. They milled about, nipping at each other, eyes
wide in the sudden light from the lantern. Jon’s father
finally slammed the door, and had started back
toward the house when they heard it. A high whine, on
the very edge of audibility, lancing the ears.

Night became day. An incandescent flame arced
over the ridge, bisecting the sky, followed by the dull
crump of an explosion. The after-image flared purple
in Jon’s retinas and only faded later, after his father
had seized the rifle and started working his way up the
slope to see what had fallen. Jon cried out, staggering
through the snow to run after him.

A furnace roared on the Eagle’s Beak, secondary
explosions blasting jagged pieces of metal into the
darkness to fall clattering down the mountainside.
Something taller and wider than a man had come out
of the flames, a shape that wouldn’t quite focus in
Jon’s eyes. Fantastically, like melting wax, it chang-

Our Next Issue

The next issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction will
feature return appearances by several ABO regu-
lars including Patricia Anthony, Robert A. Met-
zger, Emily Devenport and newcomers Jamil
Nasir and Phil Jennings — which will mark the first
time we’ve ever published a story by one of the
characters who appeared in one of our stories. If
that doesn’t make sense, don’t worry — Laurel
Lucas will explain it in her Aborigines column next
issue.

March/April 1988

ed form as he watched. Almost man-like features
dissolved, melted into a sphere, became a writhing
network of hands and eyes.

Above the creature a wheel of brilliant blue light
appeared. Circle turned within circle, tiny motes of
brilliance orbiting a central fire. Then the wheel
winked out, to be replaced by a field of swarming
lights, with numbers and symbols near each.

There was a shot, the smell of powder in the air.
The creature ignited, an internal glow that lit pulsing
organs amid a lace of fiery filaments. Jon heard liquid
spattering into the snow.

Numbers appeared in the air again. Mathemati-
cal symbols Jon could not fathom. Equations.

A second shot rang out.

The writhing form compressed, became oval,
stretched. Became a tapered cylinder like a seal.
Glowed blue, then red. Became a snapping jaw.

Jon gaped as the jerking carapace howled in the
snow. And then he was whirled to one side, dragged by
his arm ten yards through the powder. His father’s
face was mottled by the dancing flames. “Run.”

They slid in the deep drifts making their way
down the ridge line, falling flat as a final explosion
behind them turned the crevices of the valley violet
and left blistering burns on Jon’s neck.

Scattered fires still burned by the next afternoon
but the wreckage had cooled. They searched the area
all day in ever widening circles but found no tracks.
The attack came just after midnight. Jon and his fa-
ther ran out into the agate night to find the terrified
sheep crowded together in a corner of the building.

Bloody fragments of flesh littered the hut, gnawed
bones and tissue black in the lantern’s glow.

And outside, where the creature must have fled,
there was nothing. The snow stood undisturbed, gently
piling into drifts. They searched behind the hay and up
in the loft, then out from the croft by moonlight. There
were no tracks.

Jon’s father took the gun and went up the ridge
while Jon guarded the house. He didn’t come back.
Searching for him in the morning, Jon found both
bodies in a crevice on the Eagle’s Beak, surrounded
by shadows of twisted metal that rose in bizarre pat-
terns, like the alphabet of an undecipherable lan-
guage. He buried his father that afternoon, in the bank
by the frozen stream.

The creature he left where it had fallen. It lay in
the hushed light in the form of a huge, segmented
snake, stinking like drying fish. On the day that Gisli
Asgeirsson came to the croft to say a blessing over his
father’s grave, Jon showed the priest what had killed
his father. Gisli marveled at the shell-like flange, the
armored legs.

The priest crossed himself. “Blasphemy is here
made flesh,” he said.

In the spring, when the snow melted, huge,
bleached bones lay under a brilliant sky. The shards of
metal, twisted by obscene force, gleamed in the
sunlight. They did not rust. In the coming years, they
stood there as though impervious to wind and rain,

detritus washed up from the cosmic sea.

*****

( Continued to page 56)

** Aboriginal ~

Science Fiction

Tales of the Human Kind , (an Feb. 1988 S3.00

ink

Ray Aldridge
Kristine K. Rusch
John E. Stith

■ l-

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/fr

By Susan Ellison

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PAGE 7

To Be An Auk

By Elaine Radford

Art by David R. Deitrick

In their new adult suits of black and white, the
stump-winged birds might have been a flock of
penguins pressing against my knees, their compress-
ed bills opening like flowers to show their bright
yellow gapes. I handed down the last fish and scrat-
ched the handiest bird above the beak where an oval of
white would sprout in summer. The great auk closed
its eyes and stretched its comical head in satisfaction.
The others chortled softly as they settled into the job
of digestion; a few waddled about slowly while the rest
lolled on their snowy bellies. Only when the reporter
spoke was I jolted back into an awareness of the cam-
eras and the itchy microphone taped against my neck.

“Dr. Buller, what made you choose the great auk
out of all the possible candidates for resurrection?” he
asked, ignoring the bird that tugged curiously at his
trousers.

More wary than my birds, I hesitated. It would be
rude to point out that no one wants the passenger
pigeon in its billions feeding on the ruined hills of Ohio,
that farmers would rather shoot the Carolina parakeet
than watch it sample their fruit. Certainly I couldn’t
describe how I decided that the great auk, eater of
trash fish, breeder on worthless rock, just might have
some slim chance of escaping the all-devouring maw
of humanity. Finally I said simply that it was my life-
time dream to restore the first bird ever called a
penguin to its harsh northern waters. The public, I
know, loves it when a man as wind-battered and Yan-
kee-rough as I waxes romantic.

When the TV crew packed up its gear and left,
satisfied that it had witnessed the salvation of a
species, I wouldn’t have known how to dissuade them.
They’d seen the lab, interviewed the biologists, filmed
the computer analysis of damaged cell matter coaxed
from ancient museum specimens, even ventured into
the recombinant lab where we cooked up the fresh
cells in glittering glass tubes. They think — their
viewers who send the money think — that the real
work is over. I’ve conceived and raised to adulthood
twenty-seven living examples of Alca impennis, a bird
that has not walked on this earth since 1844, when the
last two birds (a breeding pair caring for their single
egg) were killed by collectors in “much less time than
it takes to tell it.”

But it was never my intention to raise up these lit-
tle retarded people in auk suits who clown so charm-
ingly for the camera. There are enough people, much
more than enough people, and I have never yet met

one worth striving for. I meant to resurrect a bird, its
lifestyle and behaviors as well as its body. Perhaps it
would have been better if the arrogant twentieth-
century sociobiologists were right — if all behavior
was engraved in the genes, my worries would be over.
But things are never that simple. Instincts are the
flimsiest plastic guides to life, easily perverted. My
auks have learned to be my children, and I do not
know how I, merely human, shall teach them what it is
to be an auk.

*** *** ***

Sarah thought she could do it. Perhaps. She would
have to be better than the behaviorist who suggested
weaning the auks from humankind with an escalating
series of electric shocks, better than the anonymous
men who prefer birds to people and hence seem too
much like me to teach them caution.... Sarah was cer-
tainly different. I’d been startled when she appeared
in my office.

“I’m Sarah Wingate, the aviculturist who phoned
you about the position,” she said as she walked in, of-
fering her tiny hand. I shook it, feeling the fine bones
through her paper-thin skin. With her short dark hair
feathered around the bleached-bone whiteness of her
face, she might have been an auk herself were it not
for the fragile delicacy of her features. “I appreciate
your taking the time to talk with me. Although I real-
ize that you were advertising for an ornithologist, I
think I can demonstrate that I’m really what you
want.”

Her confidence took my breath away. I could
probably break her slender back with my two hands
and could certainly send her packing without the job
for which she hadn’t the proper degree, but she was as
fearless as one of the auks I’d raised from single-
cellhood. “I’m not sure what you can do for me,” I
said. “Aviculture deals with captive birds. My goal is
to teach my auks how to survive in the wild. ’ ’

She smiled. “Practical experience with retraining
birds is what I have to offer, Dr. Buller. From the time
I was able to walk, I worked with my parents in their
raptor breeding facility. A large part of our work con-
sisted of preparing captive-born birds of prey for life
in the wild. More recently, I participated in a private
project to monitor the release of captive-bred
Venezuelan siskins back into the Amazon rain forest.
I’ve taught hawks how to be hawks, eagles how to be
eagles, and finches how to be finches. Now I’d like
nothing better than the opportunity to teach auks how

PAGE 9

March/April 1988

to be successful auks — because I know I’ll do it
right.”

I’d heard promises before. “How would you pro-
ceed?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t want to get locked into an
agenda before I’ve observed the birds, but I’ll proba-
bly start by weaning the birds from your care. They’re
going to have to learn to focus on one another if they’re
going to form a successful breeding colony, and their
strong affection for you could interfere with that. I’ll
probably be hauling out the feed, cleaning the pens
and pool, anything that involves close physical contact
with the birds — at least until the birds stop showing
such an extreme dependence on you.” She smiled
again as I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t worry about my
size. I’m used to carrying more than my own weight.”

“I was more concerned about the emotional reac-
tion of the birds,” I confessed. “When I’ve tried to
wean them from me in the past, they’ve gone off their
feed and acted so depressed I feared for their lives.”

She nodded. “Sure. And if you were dealing with a
single bird, you’d have good reason to worry. But in
this case, I think you’ll find that the auks will learn to
transfer that considerable affection to each other.
May we try it?” She rose, ready to get to work. I found
myself feeling half-tricked, half-relieved as I shook

her hand once more to seal our bargain.

*** *** ***

The crew was doubtful about my choice at first.
All were experienced biologists who’d often com-
plained that they hadn’t gone to college to shovel auk
shit. But they grumbled more than ever now that
Sarah, observing that the flock seemed to show a
special interest in all human males, banned the whole
team from the pen. For the first couple of days, you
could hear the birds croaking from inside, and the
men grew twitchy as they worked in the lab.

They regularly visited the monitor in my private
office, where they shook their heads at Sarah’s brus-
que, unsentimental handling.

“She’s not even a real scientist,” one of the older
men, a microbiologist, grumbled. “Just a damn
budgie-breeder.” He spat the last two words on the
ground like a curse.

By the third day, a couple of auks had lost such a
dangerous amount of weight that they had to be tube-
fed. I watched the monitor with growing concern, my
heart squeezed tight, as Sarah snaked a length of
plastic down the throat of one of my birds. The vet
assisting her held the auk firmly as it kicked feebly
against its food. When Sarah removed the tube, the
bird promptly regurgitated its unsatisfactory meal. I
turned away, having seen quite enough.

Within seconds, I was at the rear of the auk house,
key in hand. I paused for a heartbeat, remembering
that I’d promised to let Sarah alone while she weaned
the birds from my presence. But my promise to the
birds themselves — the promise of life — had to
supersede that vow. I opened the door.

Quick as thought, Sarah was there, pushing me
back and slamming the door behind us. “What are you
doing?” she cried. “One of the birds is still inside on
the table!”

“That bird needs me,” I said. “Your experiment

has gone far enough.”

“It’s time that bird grew up and learned to eat
without Mommy,” Sarah replied. “You come in there
now and I’ll have to start weaning it all over again.”

“It’s dying,” I said. “It can’t sustain this kind of
weight loss.”

“It won’t have to,” she said. “The crying’s al-
ready stopped, and most of the birds are feeding at
near-normal levels. I doubt we’ll have to tube-feed
anyone after tomorrow. But if you interrupt now and
we have to start the whole trauma over from scratch,
well, then I can’t guarantee any happy endings—”

I shook my head. “Can’t risk it.” I opened the door
and strode in, brushing her aside. Marlene Canyon,
the vet, was washing up. The auk was nowhere to be
seen.

“ ’Lo, Dr. Buller,” she said cheerfully. “Come for
a look at the weight charts?”

“I came for a look at my birds,” I said firmly.

“Give ’em two more days,” she replied in that
same artificial voice that she used for reassuring the
birds.

“Now,” I said.

“Now?” She looked behind me at Sarah, and her
eyes sparkled. “You sure about that?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

Then I felt the sting of the hypodermic. I turned to
snatch the needle from Sarah’s slim hand but never
completed the motion.

I woke thirty-six hours later, Sarah’s birdlike
head hovering over me. “You’re fired,” I said.

“The birds are doing splendidly,” she replied.
“They just needed a little time to convince themselves
they could make it without Mommy.”

“Damn you. I’m not their Mommy.” My voice
was weak and crackly, and I wasn’t ready to show that
I agreed that the progress of the birds was worth my
ludicrous drugging.

She saw through me, though, and uttered a laugh
that was more relief than amusement. “Of course you

are,” she said. “Of course you are. ”

*** *** ***

A month passed and the birds thrived, though they
always rushed me on their clumsy legs should I hap-
pen to walk near the pen. It was the wrong time of
year for courting, but Sarah insisted that certain birds
were developing favorites, a sure sign that they were
no longer fixated on a large male human. Meanwhile,
the boys in the lab reported that another couple of
cultures had almost certainly taken. It was a time for
basking in a sense of accomplishment, maybe dream-
ing a little. Perhaps I would be ready to release a col-
ony of auks in a year or two, returning a once-existent
species to the wild for the first time in history.
Perhaps ....

Then the Zugunruhe, the urge to migrate, hit.

There’s a very good reason why most pet birds
hail from the tropics or the Australian drylands,
where nomadic wandering replaces the violent drive
to migrate found in so many northern temperate
birds. A German keeper once told me that American
robins will break their bodies on their cages during the
migration season, if their flights aren’t precisely
designed to be small enough to prevent them from

March/April 1988

PAGE 10

gaining momentum without being too small to prevent
the diseases of boredom and lack of exercise. And the
common loon, a lake analog to the auk that has just
barely maintained its ability to get into the air, will
starve or mutilate itself if denied the chance to join its
migrating fellows.

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that when the air
turned crisp the auks suddenly refused to eat, preferr-
ing to bash their precious heads against the walls of
their pool. Again and again, they’d dive, swim vio-
lently, and crash into the concrete wall. One bird
bloodied its head by banging it repeatedly against the
side of the pool, and I feared for its life when it refused
to eat or take comfort even when Sarah brought it to
me and placed it in my arms. I felt let down, betrayed.
“What do you suggest we do about this, Miss
Wingate? ’ ’ I asked in a tense voice.

Her eyes flashed as she met my gaze. “What you
always intended to do,” she said slowly. “Set them
free.”

“Are you mad? My birds aren’t ready for release!
They don’t know where to go or how to catch their own
fish or—!”

“ ‘My’ birds, Dr. Buller?” Her tone was arch. “I
thought we’d progressed beyond that.”

“They’re just not ready,” I repeated stubbornly.

“Of course we’ll have to go with them,” she said.
“Show them the way. Teach them to fish. Alert them
to the dangers.”

“It’s too soon,” I answered flatly. She shrugged as
she filled a squeeze bulb with pureed fish. The auk,
alert to her intentions, twisted in my arms and clen-
ched its odd bill tightly shut. By the time it had
regurgitated its third insufficient meal onto my shirt,
I was ready to hear her out.

*** *** ***

The enormous breeding colonies of great auks had
been centered in two areas, Funk Island, off the coast
of Newfoundland, where the flightless birds were too
close to predacious man to long survive, and the Bird
Island chain off the southwest coast of Iceland. I
preferred the latter as the starting point for the
migration, since I hoped that the birds might return to
Eldey (Fire) Rock to breed as had a large group of
their extinct ancestors. True, the stability of the chain
is doubtful — in fact, an 1830 volcanic explosion had
sunk a sizable great auk breeding colony along with a
rocky island — but I felt the birds could handle the in-
termittent catastrophes of nature better than the
ongoing catastrophe of humanity. Travel from Eldey
to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where I planned
to teach the birds to winter, was perhaps more haz-
ardous for us humans than sticking more closely to the
Atlantic coastline, but I was never in this business for
humans. My birds were going to have the best possible
chance to make it.

There would be two rafts accompanying the birds
on their migration, as well as the helicopter assist, for
Sarah insisted on leading the birds herself. “I’d rather
downplay your role, keep you in the background as
much as possible,” she said. “The birds need to keep
their emotional attention focused on one another.” I
knew she was right, and I must confess I wasn’t con-
cerned enough about the danger to her to stop her. The

birds had to come first. Their lives had been stolen
from them for well over a century, and it was worth
some risk to give them back. I still believe this.

The water was rough around Eldey Island when
we landed the choppers, but then it’s always rough.
The auks tumbled out of their carrier boxes and began
to preen unconcernedly as the crew hunted in vain for
a smooth spot to set up the tents. “Hope you like sleep-
ing on rocks, boss,” Larry said as a stake snapped in
his hands. But I only half-heard him as I breathed the
salt spray and studied the white-tipped waves. It
would be a rough ride.

Sarah set up a light, low fence around the preen-
ing birds ; we needed nothing more complex since this
tiny rock had no predators to bother us. Gannets, kit-
tiwakes, murres, and razorbilled auks, the small,
flighted cousins of the great auk, flew up from their
roosting places in some agitation, the gulls scolding us
vigorously while the other birds studied us in cautious
silence. Soon enough, the first bold razorbill had flown
into the pen to investigate the greats, and Sarah
couldn’t resist tossing it a bit of fish. A reckless ac-
tion! Within minutes, a thousand birds were upon us,
begging. They had forgotten the terrible slaughter of
over a century ago; one scrap from humanity’s table
and they were ready to be our friends. Such trust
reminded me of the accounts of how the greats were
exterminated: rushing up to greet the human ships,
they had been herded on board and slaughtered, un-
able to escape on their stumpy wings. I hardly knew
whether to laugh or cry. The twenty-seven greats,
though, had no such doubts. Their red-encircled eyes
studied their flighted fellows with what I can only

describe as unalloyed wonder.

*** *** ***

For the first few days, I monitored the weather
reports coming from the south while Sarah supervised
the great auks. Released onto the rocky beach, the
birds proved enthusiastic if not accomplished fishers.
Sarah found it difficult to round them up at the end of
the short, gray October days, and I had to use their
special love for me to call them in, hallooing from the
beach till the last of the stragglers returned. “They’re
fit, energetic, and rarin’ to go,” was Sarah’s evalua-
tion. “So how’s the weather?”

“There’s a storm breaking up along the southern
coast,” I said. “But everything’s calm at this end, and
the gusting should be over before we reach the
Mason-Dixon line. If the birds are agreeable, I guess
we can leave tomorrow.”

She grinned. “Great! Even using your inex-
plicable charm, I don’t think I could have held them
back much longer.”

My charm, indeed! Annoyed, I turned away to
give the order for the final raft preparations. After a

moment, Sarah walked away.

*** *** ***

The migration would be risky. No matter how
carefully we chose our starting date, we were sure to
see storms, predators, and exhaustion before the end
of the month that it would take us to reach the Outer
Banks. If not for the helicopter assist, the journey
would have been too dangerous for sane human be-
ings. Yet my heart pounded with excitement as we

PAGE 11

March/April 1988

loaded up and headed out.

Sarah played the part of the “lead” bird, while I
rounded up stragglers from the rear and sides. Not
that we really knew very much about the migration
customs of the great auk — that has been lost — but we
assumed that the more experienced “birds” (Sarah
and I) would be expected to guide the yearlings since,
as with most large birds, the details of the route had to
be learned. We humans, of course, could cheat, since
our radios kept us on track with the help of a satellite
guidance system !

I expected a couple of false starts, but the auks
cooperated beautifully, diving after us as we pushed
off. Sarah didn’t even need the bait she’d planned to
toss after her as a bribe; as she’d promised, the birds
were rarin’ to go. I circled the rear of the flock easily,
counting the eager heads held high out of the water.
Everything looked fine. After a moment, Sarah swit-
ched on her motor and picked up some speed, and the
auks, as one bird, dived gracefully to begin their long

flight through the water.

*** *** ***

“I shouldn’t have looked back so often,” Sarah
was complaining at the end of the third day. We were
scrunched down on an unlikely bit of rock that the
auks had spotted earlier in the afternoon, grateful that
we wouldn’t be spending this night at sea but now hop-
ing for the further miracle of escaping the relentless
wind. “God’s turned me into a pillar of salt.”

I looked at her wind-whipped skin and salt-strung
hair, then rubbed at the coarse beginnings of a beard
that had sprouted on my chin.

“I guess by the time we get to North Carolina we’ll
look about how they expect a couple of crazy Yankees
to look,” she continued. I shrugged. “You sure don’t
talk much, do you, Jacob?”

I shrugged again. “Not much to talk about.
Things’re going fine. You’re doing a splendid job.”

“Well, thank you.” She grinned. “Wish I had that
one on tape. The boys’ll never believe it.”

I stood. Instantly the auks, who had been lolling
about on the rocks in various positions of decadent
ease, stretched their alert necks. Behind me, Sarah
sighed, a sound almost lost in the constant wind.
Almost.

*** *** ***

Three weeks passed. We were never more than a
few miles offshore now. The auks persisted in swimm-
ing inward toward the richer shoals of fish that
clustered around oil rigs and floating trash. The ex-
posed skin that had been whipped dry up north was
now slick with grime and filthy water, and the birds
were as slim as black-and-white arrows. The greater
part of each day was spent herding the auks away
from the fishing trawlers. It was a frustration to me
that the same affection which kept them near me was
the only thing that seemed to prevent them from div-
ing headlong into a killing net. Could they never be
weaned from humanity? Would they ever again be a
natural species?

Sarah must have been thinking along the same
lines, for in the quiet of a moonless night, she asked
me how many times I would be willing to accompany
the birds on their semi-annual migrations. “As many

PAGE 12

times as it takes,” I said grimly. Then we both stared
silently at our vulnerable group of twenty-seven birds
sleeping on the gentle waves. One careless net could
scoop them up. Perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps
there was no place left in the world, even for the gentle
great auk.

In the morning, the radio crackled with some im-
patience. “Late hurricane forming to the south,” Joe
said.

I’d been afraid of that very thing. “Guess we’d
better hurry it up.”

“You ought to make landfall at the Outer Banks in
two more days,” he replied. “Should be time.”

“Yeah.”

The wind had picked up a little, energizing the
birds; they frisked through the tops of the waves like
porpoises. Spray stung my face like a swarm of mos-
quitoes as I circled round the back, trying to keep
everyone close together. Sarah was moving just ahead
of the main flock with one of the more aggressive
birds at her side. It nuzzled at her raft periodically, as
if puzzled by the strange feel of this plastic bird. The
wind blustered some more, and the first drizzling
began. By nightfall, the chopper had called down to
order us in. “Storm’s coming in faster than we
thought,” Joe said in a tight, impersonal voice.

“I can’t leave the birds out here alone,” I said
flatly.

His sigh crackled in my radio. “We can airlift ’em
the rest of the way, Jacob.”

Sarah tossed me a look from the other raft. I nod-
ded at her grimly. “And waste the month we spent
teaching them where to go? Sorry, Joe. I can’t do it.”

“Lord, Jacob, send the girl in at least—”

“Tell him the girl won’t go ! ” Sarah yelled.

“They’re my birds,” I said to her. “My responsi-
bility. You don’t have to—”

“Bull I don’t have to. You think I’d leave you out
here all by yourself? Those birds need some kind of
back-up.”

The thought that the birds would have a better
chance of having somebody to lead them through if
there were two of us shut me up quick. Joe cursed us
for a couple of fools when I ordered him to take the
chopper in without us. No use risking the rest of the
crew. Anyway, once the gale-force stuff hit, they
wouldn’t be able to do anything for the birds anyway.

It was entirely up to me and Sarah now.

*♦* *** ***

Night. The sky was low and featureless. I shivered
in the darkness and wondered how it was possible that
it could be warm enough for a hurricane to shape up
just a few hundred miles to the south. Sarah’s body
was a dark shape on the other raft. The auks, bothered
by something they sensed in the gusty wind, only
half-dozed on the water around me; as soon as one
black head slumped down, another strained upward,
peering anxiously at me for reassurance. I made the
right soothing noises and looked forward to Sarah’s
watch. On this voyage, the only time I had alone was
when I slept.

The wind changed, and there was a sudden
foulness in the air. The stench of death. I looked about
for the lights of the trawler, then for the faraway flash

March/April 1988

of the ship that had dumped some trash. Nothing.
Darkness. Not even a single star overhead. The auks
croaked anxiously, and I became aware of a weak
splashing. The first head, a bird just above me,
vanished. I flashed my light downwards and caught a
glimpse of terrified red eyes trapped inside some kind
of netting. “Sarah!” I yelled as I slipped off my life
jacket and dived to its rescue. I was only dimly aware
that the other birds were following me, swimming
down toward their trapped companion.

Something tugged at my arms. I slashed impa-
tiently with my knife, dropping the light I’d held in the
same hand. Damn! I gulped some air and jumped
after it. Then terror grabbed me as I was swallowed
up by netting. I hadn’t known the trap was so large.
For an instant, I hesitated. I couldn’t slash wildly in
the dark, risk cutting my birds. Then my lungs began
to ache. I moved forward tentatively, feeling the
heavy plastic twist about my arms and chest as I
awkwardly moved the knife into position. A slim
shape nuzzled me in the darkness and I touched it
briefly, the only reassurance I could offer. Then I
began to gently slice the bonds that held us tight. And
then the lights came on.

Oh, God. I saw what I was doing. With the last
breath of my burning lungs, I was setting free a young
gray shark. I felt myself go still with utter terror.

Yes, of course I knew that the shark must have
eaten its fill; it was, after all, the promise of an easy
meal that had trapped it in this net full of dying fish.
And yes, I knew that this cold-blooded predator, an
expert in cadging meals from sick or injured animals,
would rather flee from a healthy human than devour
him. But still I froze in superstitious fear. Not for
myself. For my birds.

And then Sarah was at my side, the warning lamp

of her raft directed down to light her dive. She worked
swiftly, as if she’d read my mind, cutting free the
trapped auks before making the slightest move in my
direction. And even in the depths of my fear, I was
aware enough to be grateful for the miracle that I
didn’t have to be able to speak for her to understand
what was most important.

The last auk bobbed up above me. Sarah shooed
the flock away, her lips shaping into the unlikely
scraw! of a distressed gull. Then she swam down to
me at last. Her knife gleamed. All of this took much
less time than it takes to tell it.

I bounded upward, choked in all the ill-smelling
air I could get, and only then looked around to see
what she was doing. “Sarah. No!”

“I won’t leave them trapped here,” she said, her
knife still busy. There seemed to be a forest of eyes
below her, and I wondered just how many of those
eyes belonged to sharks. The gill net lost by the fisher
had kept on fishing, kept on attracting hungry
predators into its deadly coils ... and now Sarah dived
among them, planning to release them into the dark
waters.

“They’ll kill our birds! ” I cried.

She bobbed up to rest a moment and looked me in
the face. “Most of them are harmless. And most of the
sharks are dead. They can sleep for a few hours, sure,
but then they die if they can’t keep swimming, keep
that oxygen moving over their gills. Even a ‘damn
budgie-breeder’ knows that much. What I don’t know
is how long they’ve been here already.”

I knew she was right. The sharks wanted nothing
more than to get away, the same as the other fish. But
how could I risk it? How could I trust?

( Continued to page 63)

March/April 1988

PAGE 13

BOOKS

By Darrell Schweitzer

American Fantasy

One of the characteristics of
the generic fantasy — you know,
those medieval, Tolkienoid things
with castles and quests, dragons
and damsels — is that it has a
distinctly European flavor, in as
much as it has any flavor at all.
After all, the United States is too
young a country to have any pro-
per epics. Our culture is a pan-
European stew. This is not to
deny that the Song of Roland or
Beowulf or even The Odyssey are
part of the cultural heritage of
any American writer. My own
ancestry is largely German-
French, with a sprig of Welsh and
a touch of Irish, so who’s to say
that a millennium ago some
forebear of mine didn’t touch up
the Tain or interpolate a line into
the Niebelungenliedl After all, as
authors of time-travel stories
know (particularly the sort where
somebody goes back and im-
pregnates his many-times-
great-grandmother), the gene
pool spreads out over the cen-
turies until we are all about
equally descended from William
the Conquerer or Attila the Hun
or Ulf, an obscure peasant who
lived in Thuringia in the time of
Charlemagne.

But at the same time, it
follows that a particular culture
is more alive for people still in-
habiting the very earth whence it
sprang. So, while any American
has a perfect right to produce
Celtic fantasy, for the American,

RATING SYSTEM

☆ ☆☆☆
ir ☆ ☆

☆ ☆

*

Outstanding
Very good
Good
Fair
Poor

PAGE 14

it’s more a matter of book-learn-
ing, and maybe a visit to Ireland.
That sort of thing might have
come more naturally to James
Stephens, who was Irish.

All this may go some distance

to explain why, until very recent-
ly at least, virtually all the great,
traditional fantasies based on
European legendry were written
by Europeans. For the Ameri-
cans, the material was remote,
almost an affectation. (Look at
James Branch Cabell’s work —
very affected indeed.)

What surprises me is that
more American writers haven’t
done the obvious and plunged into
the underbrush where the Red-
coats can’t follow. Why haven’t
we seen more distinctly Ameri-
can fantasies? Stephen Vincent
Benet wrote some wonderful ones
back in the 1930s, but for years
the chief practitioner of the art
was the late Manly Wade

March/April 1988

Wellman. And he had few follow-
ers.

But now we have, at last, a
major American fantasy :

Seventh Son
By Orson Scott Card
Tor, 1987
241 pp., $17.95

and ...

Red Prophet
By Orson Scott Card
Tor, 1988
311 pp., $17.95

Card is, of course, best known
for his science fiction. He’s been
enjoying a winning streak for
Hugos and Nebulas of late, with
Ender’s Game and Speaker for
the Dead. But he also won the
World Fantasy Award last year
for a novelette, “Hatrack River,”
which forms the first five
chapters of Seventh Son.

I am not convinced that
‘‘Hatrack River” worked all that
well as a novelette, but it does
form the prologue to what looks
like is going to be a substantial
American fantasy.

‘‘Hatrack River” tells the
story of the birth of a miraculous
child, how even nature itself is
perturbed at his auspicious entry
into the world, and the great
forces of light and darkness that
gather around him to influence
his life one way of the other in
preparation for some final con-
flict. In the hero’s birth is the seed
of his own destruction. Somebody
knows a secret as all-important
as the giant’s heart in the fairy
tale, which was buried under a
tree and kept the giant invincible
as long as nobody dug it up.

Further, there are a variety
of apparitions as the child’s mi-
raculous powers develop. He has
a mysterious, Gandalfian
wanderer of a mentor. He falls in
with a wizard who bears him up
into a whirlwind so that he might
see the future. All the while the
boy struggles to be worthy of his
destiny while remaining aware of
his limitation: earth, air, and fire
will support him, but water is his
enemy.

Such a plot could easily fit in-
to a Lord of the Rings clone, with
the standard setting: medieval
never-never land, with
princesses, dragons, castles, and
the like.

But, who says such a story
must be set in a fake medieval
Europe?

It doesn’t. Card’s epic takes
place in America in the early
nineteenth century. Where
previous fantasists have given us
a Europe that never was, Card
gives us an America that never
was.

The results are interesting.
Card’s world is one that differs
subtly from our own. History has
begun to diverge. The date at the
outset is (counting the hero’s age
backwards from the battle of
Tippecanoe, which occurs in vol-
ume II) about 1802 . England still
has a Lord Protector, but there
are Cavalier duchies in the
American South. The American
Revolution has fizzled, leaving
the lands east of the Mississippi a
patchwork of tiny nations: New
England, the United States, Ap-
palachee, and several unattached
territories. Canada is still in the
hands of the Royalist French, and
the assistant commander of the
French forces in Detroit is one
Napoleon Bonaparte.

All this is ordinary enough
alternate history. But where most
writers would give us a realistic
story set within such a
framework, Card moves into su-
pernaturalism, myth, and, yes,
true epic.

It works. The alternate
American setting is just far
enough removed from historical
reality that we can accept magic
and the kind of magical story
Card is telling. Had this been set
in generic fantasy-land, it would

have lost a certain immediacy.
Had it been set in the real Ameri-
can past, Card would have been
seriously hampered. His tale
can’t follow history very closely.

Seventh Son is very much an
origin story of the miraculous
Alvin Miller, the seventh son of a
seventh son, who is born with
powers that are miraculous even
by the standards of a community
where everyone has a certain
magical “knack.” He must be
shaped for good before he
becomes an instrument of evil.
Much danger is hanging over
him. He is clearly, as the pro-
tagonist of a proper epic should
be, Someone Important, but he
doesn’t know it yet.

In Red Prophet, Card makes
fuller use of his uniquely Ameri-
can subject matter. The crux of
the conflict here is the death of
the land itself. To the Indians, the
land is alive, and men live in
careful balance with the Earth.
To the Whites, the land is to be
cleared and ploughed and sown.
Card ably captures the point of
view of the Indians’ shamanistic
religion: the Indians draw super-
natural power from the land. As
the Whites invade, that power
fades.

Enter numerous historical
characters: Alvin heals, then
becomes the apprentice of the
Indian known to history as the
Shawnee Prophet, who began a
movement (actually led by his
brother Tecumseh — whom Card
calls Ta-Kumsaw) to drive the
Whites from the land forever. But
William Henry Harrison fought
them to a draw at Tippecanoe,
and the Indian movement col-
lapsed. Harrison used the victory
to catapult himself into the White
House with the memorable slogan
‘ ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler too ! ”

That’s what happened in our
history. Card alters the events
and the characters of the partici-
pants. His Prophet is much more
of a pacifist than the real one was.
His Harrison is one of the most
black-hearted scoundrels to ap-
pear in recent fiction. Alvin,
foreseeing catastrophe, struggles
to find some alternative to
slaughter. He, like Ender Wiggin
in Ender ’s Game, is forced to
grow up very fast and bear all the

March/April 1988

world’s pain and guilt. As the
story becomes more overtly alle-
gorical, Alvin is very much the
crucified savior — but without
any certain hope of salvation. At
the end of the second book there
has been much suffering, and
there is a lot of guilt to go around,
but there is no clear resolution.

The Indians get massacred
at Tippecanoe. Harrison departs
under a curse and will never be
president, though he might,
someday, expiate his guilt. The
Prophet withdraws the tribes
across the Mississippi, but this is
at best a temporary solution. And
we shall be hearing more of
Alvin, and I doubt he’ll have an
easy time of it.

Card has impressively woven
an epic fantasy out of the Ameri-
can past. The conflict between the
White man’s world and the Red
grabs hold of our emotions. It’s a
lot more substantial than the
usual battle of Light and Dark-
ness.

Because Card is a more
sophisticated writer than many,
his conflict isn’t as simple as
Light vs. Dark anyway. He is a
moralist, aware that good and
evil reside in all of us. His good
and his evil are all the more con-
vincing because they are am-
biguous. This is, I think, the real
strength of the series. It is not a
cartoon. It is about something as
important and as complex as life
itself.

His other great strength is
characterization. All the major
characters come alive. They are
real, memorable people.

His weakness is style. Card is
at best an adequate wordsmith,
and his dialogue in particular is
sometimes wooden. Some of the
descriptions are simply not as
vivid, as luxuriant as they should
be. Worse yet, he frequently at-
tempts rusticisms, the kind that
would add flavor to the telling in a
first-person narrative, but that
are merely obtrusive and Dear-
Readering in third. ( “She gave no
never mind to the chicken drips.
After all, when folk with babies
stayed in the roadhouse, Mama
never even crinkled her face at
the most spec tackier diapers.”)

But you get used to it after a
while, and don’t give it no never

PAGE 15

mind, because this is a fantasy
with a heart. It’s about some-
thing. And it isn’t like the last
dozen fantasy series you might
have read.

It does seem to be at least a
trilogy, though.

Rating (for both volumes):

☆ ☆ tfr it

Stephen King and
Science Fiction

The Tommyknockers
By Stephen King
Putnam
558 pp., $19.95

Stephen King has been a
science fiction writer for quite
some time. Because of the way
books get pigeonholed in this
country, I am sure some of you
haven’t noticed. King’s books are
packaged as horror, every last
one of them, be they supernatural
or realistic suspense or epic fan-
tasy or science fiction. I am sure
that if King wrote a romantic
comedy it would be made to look
sinister in book form.

His science fiction includes a
variety of stories about ESPers,
including Carrie, The Dead Zone,
and Firestarter; two future
dystopias, The Running Man and
The Long Walk (the latter also
partaking of the SF convention of
the alternate history) ; a couple of
interplanetaries (“The Jaunt”
and “Beachworld”) and a variety
of stories about scientifically
produced monstrosities invading
the here and now, most notably
“The Mist.”

The difference between
King’s SF and what you might
find in, say, Analog, is that his is a
lot less comforting. Authority
figures are seldom good guys. His
characters are just ordinary
people trying to survive, very far
removed from the “competent
man” tradition fostered by John
Campbell.

While I could not imagine
King ever having sold anything to
Campbell, there’s nothing in his
subject matter that would have
ruled him out. Carrie, as a
novelette in a 1950s Astounding,
would have been about a conspir-
acy of psychically talented “wit-
ches” (who’ve passed their lore

PAGE 16

on from mother to daughter) who
must band together, possibly with
the help of some secret gov-
ernment agency, to stop the rogue
ESPer Carrie White from
destroying this small town in
Maine, blowing everyone’s cover
and setting off an anti-psi
pogrom.

But King writes to a quite dif-
ferent set of conventions. The
structure of one of his novels is
certainly that of the horror novel,
or of the best-seller disaster

novel. And his attitudes would
have gotten him kicked out of
Analog real fast. For King, gov-
ernment folks are almost always
murderous scum. And King is the
most clearly anti-science writer
to come along in decades. He is
everything Ray Bradbury was
once accused of being. In The
Stand he laid it all out plainly: At
the end of rationality is the mass
grave.

But he remains a fine story-
teller. Within the fairly narrow
range of stories about contem-
porary people dealing with the
fantastic, he is nearly unsurpass-
ed.

The Tommyknockers is about
a woman who discovers a huge,
ancient spaceship buried in her
backyard. It is still inhabited —
sort of. Before you can say “In-
vasion of the Body Snatchers,”
the people in a small Maine town
begin to change. They build fan-
tastic gadgets out of ordinary
materials. They become tele-
pathic, joining into a group mind.
They undergo physical change,

March/April 1988

then deterioration, all the while
laboring to unearth the ship and
hide the truth from the outside
world.

The Tommyknockers of the
title are creatures from a sinister
children’s rhyme, vaguely defin-
ed ghosts or ogres. The Tom-
myknockers inhabiting the Queen
Mary- sized flying saucer are
(perhaps) disembodied psychic
parasites, who deliberately
crashed on Earth 250,000 years
ago when their old hosts were
wearing out. Now they ruthlessly
take over the townspeople until
they can regenerate themselves
and leave. Think of them as a
slightly more individualistic ver-
sion of Lovecraft’s “Colour Out of
Space.”

All King’s familiar tech-
niques come to bear. Some of
them are, surprisingly, tired.
There are dull stretches in this
book, particularly toward the
beginning, and there’s even an
important sequence that is bot-
ched because we’re not sure if a
character is blowing herself up
out of heroic self-sacrifice to alert
the outside world, or because her
death is part of some obscure
alien design. Occasionally, logic
lapses. (If Tommyknockers lose
all their teeth, how does one ad-
vanced case go about calmly
chewing peanut butter and
cracker sandwiches? More
seriously, one dead character
flashes back a “Use the force,
Luke” message to the hero at a
crucial moment, with no ra-
tionale at all.)

On the plus side, once the
story gets moving, it roars along
in the usual gut-grabbing man-
ner. You may well read three
hundred pages of this thing in one
sitting. The characterizations
range from adequate to very
good. There are even surprising
moments of satirical comedy, as
in the positively explosive en-
counter between the drunken poet
and the world of academe. (This
same poet, through much loss and
suffering, rises to the role of hero
by the time the book is done.)

The Tommyknockers takes a
while to jell, but when it does, it’s
a great page-turner. It works
splendidly on a what happens

next basis. Much is forgiven.

Rating: * ☆ ☆

This is Tuesday,

It Must Be Rondua

Bones of the Moon
By Jonathan Carroll
Arbor House, 1987
217 pp., $15.95

This is a book I was genuinely
looking forward to, as I have
become converted to the works of
Jonathan Carroll. I owe my con-
version mostly to Edna Stumpf,
whose article on Carroll in my
Discovering Modern Horror Fic-
tion piqued my interest. Before
that, I had vaguely heard about
this wonderful book, The Land of
Laughs, which came out in the
mainstream, vanished as most
fantasies published as
mainstream do, only to be
rescued by loyal fans who bought
up the remainders and shoved
them into the hands of editors un-
til someone (Ace) reprinted the
thing as fantasy. Since then, Car-
roll has been building a following.

It’s no surprise either. He is
arguably the greatest supernatu-
ral horror writer living, mostly on
the basis of a single book, even
though his second novel, The
Voice of Our Shadow (which has
not yet been paperbacked), is no
mean accomplishment either.

If Philip K. Dick and Franz
Kafka had collaborated to write
the works of L. Frank Baum, the
result might have come out like
The Land of Laughs. And some-
where along the way, I think they
absorbed much advice from M.R.
James on the art of the proper
ghost story.

Bones of the Moon resembles
Carroll’s earlier work to the point
that if he writes a couple more
like this, his limitations will start
to show. But for the time being,
each book is unique and wonder-
ful, even though they are all of a
type. All Carroll’s novels are
about sensitive, emotionally
repressed people whose worst
nightmares intrude into reality.

For Cullen James, the nar-
rator of Bones of the Moon, the
nightmares begin as pleasant
dreams of a Baum-esque fantasy
world called Rondua. The dreams

run in sequence, as if she is peri-
odically visiting a real place. But
darkness hovers, as it becomes
clear that in some previous,
unremembered visit she failed on
a crucial mission and caused an
appalling disaster. Now, in the
company of a son she doesn’t
have in the waking world, she
must complete the quest. Slowly,
elements of the Ronduan dream
begin to invade her waking life,
while life invades Rondua — guilt
over an abortion, the unwanted
amours of an eccentric movie
director, the even more unwanted
attention of the now institu-
tionalized homicidal maniac who
used to live in the apartment
downstairs.

Carroll is a superb writer, an

A • N«Q»V*E*L ♦ B • Y

J ONATHAN • CARROLL

extremely polished stylist with an
exquisite sense of character and
tone. He can be warm, witty, or
terrifying as he chooses. He has a
striking visual sense, as he
creates the dream-world out of
commonplace images. Rondua is
not a standard mock-medieval
fantasy land. It is instead the true
stuff of dreams, bits and pieces of
waking life exaggerated and
jumbled together. Its only logic is
that of the subconscious, but that
is logic indeed.

Imagine Yellow Submarine
in live-action as serious drama
and you will begin to get the idea.

For example, when Cullen
and her son Pepsi are near the
end of their quest for the fifth
Bone of the Moon, they walk alone

March/April 1988

past the Dead Handwriting
across a plain of glass. They have
lost their companions, notably a
wise, huge dog named Mr. Tracy,
whose leg was bitten off by a
sinister camel. Beyond the Dead
Handwriting lie the dread Hot
Shoes:

The bottle-glass path turned a
sharp corner and directly ahead
were six glowing orange shoes,
two storeys high at the very least.
They were men’s Oxford shoes
and were connected to tweed-
covered legs as thick and as high
as California redwood trees that
climbed up and through the
clouds.

Things soon get much
nastier. In the end, it doesn’t
matter what is dream and what is
“real.” The two dovetail together
perfectly.

The ending is, however,
rushed. What we have here is a
217-page book that remains utter-
ly brilliant for 210 pages. Then
things are over too easily, too
quickly. The cavalry comes to the
rescue. At the very end, Carroll’s
sure mastery of his story slipped.
He has had this problem before.
Few people seem satisfied with
the ending of The Voice of Our
Shadow.

But before those last seven
pages, Bones of the Moon is a
flawless, breathtakingly original
performance.

Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ x /z

Noted:

New Destinies, Vol. II
Edited by Jim Baen
Baen Books, 1987
232 pp., $2.95

New Destinies is a continua-
tion/revival of Jim Baen’s old
Destinies series. Readers by now
know what to expect. This is the
series that out-Analogs Analog.

But, alas, the fall 1987
number is easily the weakest yet.
It is about half non-fiction, with a
strongly political slant. “The
Phobos Race,” by Donald
Frederick Robertson, gives a
glimpse of what may be the com-
ing space race — the study of
Mars from a base on Phobos.

PAGE 17

“Running Out,” by Charles Shef-
field, explores the state of the
world’s resources and comes to
some (slightly) surprising con-
clusions. ‘‘Was Frankenstein
Simply Einstein Being Frank,”
by Gregory Benford, surveys the
image of the scientist in science
fiction.

The fiction, alas, is not much
to write home about. “Moondo
Bizarro,” by Phillip C. Jennings,
manages to create a record
number of strange societies in a
short space, but there is very lit-
tle story. It’s mostly lecture/
exposition in the finest Gern-
sbackian tradition. “The Irvhank
Effect” is a rudimentary number
about two guys who discover a
radiation damper that can put an

end to the arms race — and why
lots of people don’t want the arms
race to end. “The Dreaming
Spires of Houston” pastiches
Kipling (who wrote a similar
story about ships) and is no more
than an overheard conversation
among various rockets rusting
away as they bemoan the state of
the American space program.
The key story of the issue is a
novella of computer espionage
and alien contact, “Poppa Was a
Catcher,” by Steven Gould. It is
— almost — interesting, filled
with good ideas, but never com-
ing to life. If we can’t care about
the characters, it hardly matters
how clever their tech- talk is.

A disappointing volume.

Rating: ☆

PAGE 18

Cycles of Fire
By William K. Hartmann
and Ron Miller
Workman Publishing, 1987
189 pp., $14.95

Nonfiction. This is, strictly
speaking, an astronomy text, but
a decidedly speculative one, pro-
fusely illustrated with paintings
by both Hartmann and Miller
showing dozens of vistas no
human eye has ever seen:
planetscapes of strange star
systems, globular clusters in
planetary skies, black holes,
planetary collisions, etc. The text
(by Hartmann) will certainly
stimulate the scientific imagina-
tion. It’s great stuff for you
would-be hard science fiction

writers out there. The art itself is
splendid, in the finest
Bonestellian tradition of

astronomical art.
Recommended.
Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆
— ABO —

GOOD NEWS

For All SF and
Fantasy Readers!

Get all the latest news about what’s happening in SF,
fantasy and horror in the pages of Science Fiction Chronicle:
The Monthly SF and Fantasy Newsmagazine. Just as news
weeklies bring what’s happening in the world to you, so
Science Fiction Chronicle keeps you in the know on SF and
fantasy. And not just news of who bought what and for how
much, but more: news of publishers and editors, of mergers
and other changes and how it affects you; obituaries, market
reports, letters, news from Hollywood, author signings, con-
vention reports with lots of author photos, news of books and
authors from England, a regular convention calendar, over
400 book reviews a year— more than any other publication in
the field— the latest on what’s new in computer games, audio
and videotapes.

And still more: SFC readers get a monthly directory of
what’s coming up from each publisher with prices, whether
books are new or reprint, and much more, months before
actual publication. If you buy and read a lot of SF and fantasy,
you’re sure to find this will save you the cost of your subscrip-
tion in only a few months. Plus occasional columns by
Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Karl Edward Wagner,
Vincent Di Fate.

Science Fiction Chronicle has been a Hugo Award finalist
every year since 1980. A single copy is $2; 12 monthly issues
by First Class Mail in the US are usually $23.40. Order now,
and get a year for only $18 (new subscribers only). In Canada,
add $3.00; overseas, add $6.00. Mai! your check to the
address below, today!

SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE
P.O. Box 4175A
New York NY 10163, ttsa

March/April 1988

The response to our conversion to
a full-color, full-slick format has been
overwhelming. We’ve received far too
many letters and notes to print, but
we’ll get as many as we can in this
issue and the next, so don’t stop
booming our boomerangs.

In keeping with our game plan
and long-term goals, we have added
one more upgrade for this issue —
baggies! From now on, all subscrip-
tion copies of Aboriginal Science Fic-
tion will be mailed in a clear plastic
bag with a “second-class” postage
indicia printed on the plastic. This
isn’t news to you if you’re a
subscriber, of course, since you had to
tear open the plastic bag to read this.
But it is something we thought poten-
tial subscribers would like to know.

We were a bit frustrated at how
poorly copies of issue No. 8 traveled
through the mail. Ever since our first
issue, we have received notes,
queries, demands and even threats
suggesting that we wrap, bag, bundle
or otherwise protect the magazine
from the fold, spindle and mutilation
of the mails. Others have suggested
we try the gummy glue used by some
labeling machines, which allows the
mailing label to be peeled off the
cover without damaging the art
underneath. Most said they “would
happily pay more” if we took the ap-
propriate step. (In fact, Harlan
Ellison was one of those berating me
for messing up his perfectly collect-
ible magazines with a label. He was
nice about it, but I could hear him
clearly from California and he wasn’t
using a telephone. )

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to
do much but sigh in agreement — for
two reasons. First, our previous
printer was not equipped to do either
of those options; and second, like
everything else, such things cost
money. We have been very careful to
make sure that ABO has not overex-
tended itself. We’re little guys and
don’t have the resources of Time Inc.
or Rupert Murdoch. The most impor-
tant item on our agenda was to make
certain we kept publishing.

That is a certainty now. I suspect
we are going to be around for a long,
long time.

But, as I mentioned, all these
changes cost money. We have recent-
ly been notified of the third price in-
crease for paper and printing since we
started the magazine. Add to that the
additional cost of printing full-color,

EDITOR'S NOTES
By Charles C. Ryan

Baggies

full-slick and now, the baggy, and you
may understand why we have been
forced to increase our rates. (Which
just shows how smart those of you
were who subscribed for 18 issues or
renewed early.)

The cover price, which we upped
in January, will stay at $3. The new
subscription rates are $14 for 6 issues,
24 for 12 issues, and $32 for 18 issues.
The renewal rate will be the same —
unless you self-renew early. The ear-
ly, self-renewal rate will be $12 for 6
issues, $22 for 12 issues, and $30 for 18
issues, so it still pays to take the ini-
tiative.

One or two people have expressed
disappointment that we converted
from our earlier “pulp” format.
We’ve been accused, in a friendly
manner, of breaking tradition.

That’s not how I see it. Instead of
breaking the old tradition, we’ve
created a new one — a tradition that
will set the standard by which SF
magazines will be judged in the
future. Full color, full slick.

Now for the “Oops!” category.
November, December and the first
few weeks of January were very in-
tense and exhausting. We ac-
complished a lot. All that work, and
the accompanying fatigue, however,
lead to a couple of screw-ups. A piece

of correction copy was put down in the
wrong place in the “Aborigines” sec-
tion, the wrong kind of tape was used
for several last minute paste-ins,
blurring them, and we ran out of
space. As the space narrowed down to
the last few inches, a poem written by
Bonita Kale scheduled for the issue
was bumped — only I forgot to also
remove her mention from the “Ab-
origines” column. Sorry.

As punishment, I am forfeiting
the rest of my column and giving the
space to Bonita for her poem. So I’ll
say bye for now until the next issue.

A small P.S. to those subscribers
who have ordered back issues. Please
be patient, we are getting them out as
fast as we can. The supply is getting
very low, but we have the amount
calculated to last through the number
of orders we expect.

BONITA KALE is the author of
“From a New World.”

She has three children 16, 13 and 9
years of age, and she once sold an ar-
ticle entitled “Living with
Preschoolers.”

She has a short story, “A Speak-
ing Likeness,” scheduled for an up-
coming issue of ABO and has a
children’s book making the rounds of
publishers. This is her first SF sale.

— ABO —

From A New World

By Bonita Kale

These seas never made our blood.

These tides are strangers, the life they bear
no kin of ours. No jellied cousin
greets us; no long-lost uncle shows
his teeth. Not sea, not land, not sky
can say, “We knew you when. ’’At night
we search for Sol ’s remembered day.
“There!” The children stare,
and twist a way. How can they care
for distant stars ? In heartless play
they dare the waves, and lordly stand,
digging footprints in alien sand.

— ABO —

March/April 1988

PAGE 19

FROM THE BOOKSHELF
By Janice M. Eisen

Near and Far Futures

Mercedes Nights
By Michael D. Weaver
St. Martin’s, 1987
240 pp., $16.95

This is an excellent novel:
suspenseful, well-written, and
compelling. It is set in a brilliant-
ly realized near future world.

Mercedes Night is a famous,
sexy video star whose life is turn-
ed upside down when an outlaw
cloning operation starts selling
clones of her as sex toys. The sit-
uation is complicated by her
clandestine affair with a
presidential candidate who has
powerful enemies. When some of
the clones achieve self-
awareness, things really start to
cook....

It’s a convoluted plot — in-
trigue, murder, politics, sex —
but it never becomes confusing.
Weaver keeps it under control.
Mercedes Nights is a serious
novel, but it has lots of humor,
too.

The main character is terrific
— well-drawn and clearly focus-
ed. The other characters are also
very good, especially the com-
puter nerd who creates true ar-
tificial intelligence and the
schizophrenic who believes man
is destined to transform into
“vacuum fish.”

The characters, the plot, and
the world are all very believable.
There are one or two loose ends,
but on the whole the ending is
very satisfying. The subplots fit
together well. At the end

RATING SYSTEM

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

☆ ir ☆ ☆

* ☆ ☆

■ti ir

☆

Outstanding
Very good
Good
Fair
Poor

everything comes together and
makes sense. Weaver deserves a
round of applause.

Rating:

MERCEDESNIGHTS

A SCIENCE FOON NOVEL

Michael

□Weaver

Wild Cards III: Jokers Wild
Edited by George R.R. Martin
Bantam/Spectra, 1987
384 pp., $3.95

I’m not usually partial to
shared worlds, but the “Wild
Cards” series is an exception.
The premise is that an alien virus
was released over New York City
just after World War II, causing
many deaths and creating two
special classes of people: Jokers,
who were deformed, often gro-
tesquely, and Aces, who have
superpowers.

The participating authors
had a lot of fun rewriting recent
American history to include these
“Wild Cards” — for example,
Joseph McCarthy’s hearings
focused not on Communist sym-
pathizers but on Aces. The third
book requires a lot of background
knowledge; don’t try to read it if
March/ April 1988

you haven’t read at least the first
book, and preferably the second
as well.

The first anthology consisted
of related but independent
stories, while the stories in the
second joined together to form a
narrative. This third book, which
bills itself as a “mosaic novel,”
has taken that process one step
further: it is a continuous nar-
rative, with different authors
writing the sections that focus on
the particular characters they
have created. It’s an interesting,
if not altogether successful, ex-
periment, but I found the book
less satisfying than the previous
two.

One problem is that the plot is
much more comic-bookish. While
the first book concentrated on the
Aces and Jokers and their in-
teractions with “normal” society,
this one depicts superheroes
fighting a supervillain (the
Astronomer), continuing a battle
that was begun in the second
book. I’m not a comics reader,
and I found this story much less
involving than the best stories in
the first book.

While the subplots are less
comic-bookish, they are also
much less interesting than the
main plot. One of them has two
major flaws: an idiot plot —
characters fail to look at a par-
ticular object they are trying to
get hold of, though logically they
should; and cheating — the view-
point character knows a vital fact
about this object but never thinks
about it when the reader can
“hear.”

In the previous books, each
contribution focused on one
character’s story, but this novel
concentrates on telling the story
of the battle against the

PAGE 20

Astronomer, so less time is spent
on character. We don’t learn
enough about the characters new
to this volume.

The “mosaic novel” fits
together well enough, but it has
some important problems. Bring-
ing the characters from the dif-
ferent strands together requires
several improbable coincidences.
Also, not all the individual resolu-
tions of the various plot threads
are satisfying. The contributions
of Lewis Shiner, George R.R.
Martin, and Melinda Snodgrass
are very good; Edward Bryant’s
is also good but nearly vanishes
during the course of the book.

Despite these flaws, the book
is well-written and suspenseful,
and a good read. I recommend it

to those who enjoyed the previous
books.

Rating: ☆☆☆

Kill Ratio

By Janet Morris and David Drake
Ace, 1987
268 pp. $3.50

I didn’t expect to like this
book. It didn’t look promising,
and the authors, particularly
Drake, are famed for a kind of
military SF I dislike. Much to my
surprise, I enjoyed Kill Ratio.

Most of the book takes place
on the Moon, the location of UN
headquarters. There is a sudden
rash of mysterious deaths, ap-
parently from an unknown

disease, and the main characters
must track down and stop a
genocidal plot, through webs of
violence and espionage.

The characters are very
good, well-rounded despite their
somewhat conventional roles.
The plot is interesting, the politics
are portrayed well, and the action
moves along. It’s not quite as
suspenseful as it ought to be,
because, with this sort of book,
you know how the ending will
come out, but I was drawn in
nevertheless. I do wish there had
been more explanation of the
motives of the villains.

The authors have created a
very well-realized near future,
with lots of good details. The
world is believable and solid. I

particularly liked the idea of the
Afrikaners, after a black take-
over in South Africa, as a pariah
group. I also appreciate the ter-
rorists being counter to stereo-
type.

Near the end, the book gets a
little silly, with a sadistic
Afrikaner torturer (“ve haff vays
of makink you talk”), and it
degenerates into action and
bang-bang instead of strategy
and detective work. But it’s still a
good read, and better written
than most action-adventure
novels.

Rating: ☆☆☆

Napoleon Disentimed
By Hayford Peirce

March/April 1988

Tor, 1987
306 pp., $3.50

Hayford Peirce’s first novel
is a well-written, enjoyable romp.
A con man known as the MacNair
of MacNair accidentally comes
into possession of a diamond-
encrusted religious device and is
then transported into an alternate
world in which Napoleon was
never defeated and British and
German scientists are plotting to
destroy the empire he estab-
lished. There’s a great deal of
confusion and running around,
false identities, politics and es-
pionage. The confusion is abetted
by a duplicate MacNair from this
alternate world.

There are a few problems

with the plot. The MacNair does
some things he’s too smart to do,
and I’m dubious about the ex-
istence of his doppelganger in an
alternate history that’s so dif-
ferent in other ways. I also hate
footnotes in a novel (well, there
are only three).

In general, the book is fun to
read, though the MacNair’s
pretensions can get somewhat
tiresome. Unfortunately, I found
the ending predictable as hell,
and it left one or two issues
unresolved. But Peirce has a good
touch for this kind of light SF, and
I enjoyed the novel.

Rating: ☆ ☆ ☆

PAGE 21

Memory Wire
By Robert Charles Wilson
Bantam/Spectra, 1988
224 pp., $3.50

A common theme in SF is
humanity’s receipt of a gift of
knowledge from the stars, often
leading to a paradise on Earth.
Less common are thoughtful ex-
aminations of what effect such a
longed-for gift might really have
on our world.

In Memory Wire, an ancient
extraterrestrial mineral deposit
has been found. These oneiroliths
(“dreamstones”) contain vast
amounts of information when
decoded, but they also have
strange effects on human memo-
ry, leading to their use as a drug.

The three protagonists are at-
tempting to smuggle one of these
stones out from under the nose of
the military. The main character
is an “Angel”: wires in his brain
lead to a memory chip, so that
everything he sees and hears is
recorded, as if by a camera.

Wilson has depicted a gritty,
unpleasant, and believable near
future. The characterization is
excellent, although not enough
time is spent on one of the three
main characters, and he is thus
the least comprehensible of them.

Unfortunately, the author has
created a problem for himself
with the character of the Angel.
His whole philosophy of life, his
“Angel Zen,” is to cut himself off

PAGE 22

from all feeling and emotion, to
be the “perfect mirror.” This
makes it hard for the reader to
empathize with him, and that
lack of empathy left me feeling a
bit empty and unsatisfied.

Nonetheless, the novel is ex-
citing and compelling. I recom-
mend it.

Rating:

The Kindly Ones
By Melissa Scott
Baen, 1987
371 pp., $2.95

More than 1,400 years before
this novel begins, a colony ship
was forced by a mutiny to land on
Orestes, a world much colder and
harsher than its intended desti-
nation. In order to survive, the
colonists created a complex,
strict social code based on kin-
ship, the penalty for violation of
which was death.

As time passed, the code re-
mained, but physical death was
replaced by a social “death.” The
living pretend to be completely
unaware of the socially dead,
known as “ghosts,” who function
in their own, separate world. But
now Orestes has been contacted
by the rest of humanity, and the
code is beginning to crack under
the stress.

Melissa Scott has created a
fascinating world and culture,
and filled it with believable char-
acters and an involving story.
The many details she includes
ring true and really make Orestes
live for the reader. The ending of
the novel grows inevitably out of
the situation she constructed, and
yet I did not expect it. (“The
Kindly Ones,” by the way, was a
Greek euphemism for the Furies,
who avenged crimes, especially
those against kinship. )

The book’s flaws are rela-
tively minor. The actions of the
character Guil near the end
would have been more
understandable if the reader had
seen more of her. The sex of the
main character is, apparently de-
liberately, left unstated, and I
found this an annoying trick. My
interest flagged only once, during
a long, excruciatingly detailed
flight between worlds near the
end — a particularly bad spot

March/April 1988

because suspense was building.

I like the reader’s feeling of
ambivalence about many of the
events of the story. All in all, The
Kindly Ones is an absorbing book.

Rating : * ☆ ☆ *

After Long Silence
By Sheri S. Tepper
Bantam/Spectra, 1987
352 pp., $3.95

It seems likely that many
aliens encountered by spacefar-
ing humans will not be easily
recognizable as intelligent life.
Sheri Tepper has used that idea to
create an enjoyable and
fascinating novel. After Long
Silence features wondrous,
unique aliens, an involving story,

and appealing, well-drawn pro-
tagonists.

Life on the planet Jubal is
dominated by the Presences,
huge crystalline structures which
vibrate in response to the
slightest noise. Their vibrations
kill anyone who tries to pass them
unless the Presence is first
quieted with a Password — a song
that is unique to each presence.
The songs are discovered by Ex-
plorers, and arranged and per-
formed by Tripsingers. In the
novel, an alliance of Explorers
and Tripsingers must fight com-
mercial interests and try to
communicate with the Presences.

The book’s main problem is
the villains: they are too

villainous. Not only are they
greedy and indifferent to the lives
of others, but they’re sadists,
perverts, murderers, rapists, and
grotesque-looking to boot (we
might call this the Harkonnen Ef-
fect). When the villains are so
overdrawn, they become carica-
tures and pull the reader out of
the novel.

Tepper’s also started up too
many subplots; they distract
from the main story. That story is
very good, and the charac-
terization of the good guys is ex-
cellent. I love the idea of the book
and the world Tepper has
created ; she portrays the conflic-
ting agendas of different charac-
ters well. Tepper is definitely an
author to watch. She just needs to
make her black hats three-

I’ve been impressed with William
Wu’s other work. There’s little
evidence of his presence; Cyborg
reads as if it were written by
computer.

This is the third book in the
Robot City series, but the
previous books are not essential
to understanding it. The plot is
really a ’40s short story padded
out to the novel length. Like
Asimov’s classic robot stories, it
is a puzzle: how do you find a
cyborg who looks just like the
robots he’s hiding among?

The execution of the solution
to the puzzle is well done. The
characters’ other problem — how
they can get off the world they’re
stranded on — is really a false
one; we know they won’t leave
the planet since the series con-
tinues.

Cyborg is essentially a juve-
nile novel, though it doesn’t in-
dicate this anywhere and the
back cover implies that the char-
acters are adults. The pro-
tagonists are all in late adoles-
cence, no profanity is used (the
characters’ expletive is “frost”),
and there’s no sex beyond a
chaste kiss or two. The charac-
ters Wu was handed are card-
board, and they don’t always
react the way they rationally
would.

The book’s a quick read, and
children might enjoy it, but it
seems a waste of William Wu’s
time and talent.

Rating: ☆☆

dimensional and less overstated.

Rating: ☆ ☆ * V 2

Isaac Asimov’s Robot City, Book

3: Cyborg

By William F. Wu

Ace, 1987

169 pp. $2.95

Recent months have seen the
debut of a number of “packaged”
or “franchised” series, where a
well-known author licenses a
universe he has created and
less-well-known authors write
novels set in it. I don’t like the
idea, but it would be worthwhile if
it gave authors who might not
otherwise get published a chance
to shine.

I picked up this novel because

The Movement of Mountains
By Michael Blumlein
St. Martin’s, 1987
289 pp., $17.95

The Movement of Mountains
is a weird book — interesting,
ambitious, and brilliant in spots.
It is not completely successful,
but it’s very good, and utterly
original.

Blumlein’s main character is
unique: an intelligent, excitable,
incredibly gluttonous doctor. He
leaves an Earth increasingly
divided between rich and poor,
following his lover to a world
where an essential drug is mined
by genetically engineered slaves.
His solutions to the ethical
dilemmas he encounters are

March/April 1988

sometimes shocking, but always
believable.

The book is set in a
fascinating environment, and
Blumlein describes it very well.
The main character is rich, dif-
ferent, interesting, and credible,
the others somewhat less so.
What we see of Earth is intrigu-
ing, but we don’t see enough of it
to truly appreciate the ending.

After the death of one of the
main characters, everything
winds up too fast, becoming con-
fusing, and the ending is so quick
that it’s not quite satisfying. The
narrator’s writing style is some-
what mannered, which, though
appropriate to the character, can
be tiresome at times.

This unusual novel deserves a

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wider audience, and I look for-
ward to seeing more of
Blumlein’s work.

Rating: ☆ ☆ * ^h.

Starpira te ’s Brain
By Ron Goulart
St. Martin’s, 1987
184 pp., $2.95

This book is the second in a
new series about Ben Jolson, a
character from Goulart’s old
Chameleon Corps stories, but all
the knowledge a reader needs is
provided (somewhat clumsily) in
the first few chapters. Jolson, like
other Chameleon Corps agents,

( Continued to page 51 )

PAGE 23

Sunshine Delight

By Paul Edwards

Art by Leslie Pardew

Maud Hampton had made it two thirds of the way
across the street when, as always, the light changed.
But it was during a rare lull in the electric traffic, so
she didn’t have to run, risking her brittle hips against
the likelihood of falling on the asphalt. It was better
back when most of the cars and trucks used gas. The
air might have been worse, but at least you could hear
them coming. Not that her hearing was bad. No, it was
still pretty good for age seventy-three. And her eyes,
too, thank God. They hadn’t changed her prescription
in years. When the conversation at the home got too
boring, she could escape through reading.

Maud stepped up to the sidewalk, balancing with
one hand on her umbrella, the other clutching the new
edition of Ellery Queen’s, another constant in the
swirling world of continual wars, horrid youth music,
constantly changing architecture, constantly increas-
ing inner-city danger. Maud’s collection reached back
twenty years or more ... probably worth something if
she ever really needed some extra money, which was
unlikely with the pension, her savings, and the
NatMedPlan. She stopped to catch her breath. None of
that tightness from breathing old gas engine fumes.
The second decade of the twenty-first century couldn’t
be that bad if they’d finally managed to clean up the
air.

Suddenly, the low-pitched harmonious whine of an
eighteen-wheeler emerged from the ordinary hum of
traffic to pierce all the other city noises. The massive
truck raced down the thoroughfare. Maud barely had
time to turn away as the corrugated aluminum walls
sliced past her, inches away, followed by an intense
buffet of wind. She was knocked off balance, and spun
around into the crowd of pedestrians, her hands
outstretched, wrists ready to break in the inevitable
fall to the cracked concrete.

Strong fists encircled her upper arms and she felt
herself being stood up as though she were a vase that
had toppled off an end table. She looked up to thank
her rescuer and gasped.

His black hair had been shaved at the front and
layered in a long mane at the back, and he had last
shaved his face two or three days ago. His shoulders,
immense domes of muscle ripping through the sleeves
of his Levi jacket, bore the stylized “NA” tattoo —
New Army. The eyes of a sick reptile stared unmoving
from the gaunt face. A repulsive fume of stale tobacco
and stale beer roiled from his grim mouth, which
twitched and shivered, revealing the presence of an
active cerebral communications module.

“Don’t hurt yourself, lady,” came the dulled

monotone from far away.

“No, I won’t, I ... thank you, thank you, Mister,
Mister....” She felt her pulse hammering in her neck.

“Sparkhead.”

The sound of it jarred her. “Thank you, Mr.
Sparkhead. I ... I’ve got to go, I’ve....”

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned
away, the dead-center gaze never wavering. In spite
of his hair, Maud could see the swelling at the back of
his neck where the CCM had been implanted.
Sparkhead moved into the crowd and disappeared.

Discovering she had been holding her breath,
Maud sighed noisily, caught her wind, and tripodded
away from danger. They shouldn’t let people like that
out on the street! she thought. Morton’s was only a
half block away, but it took her ten minutes to get
there, stopping every few steps. I’m shaking like a
leaf! she thought. How foolish of me.

Hot, always so hot in Greater Phoenix. At least
there were safe places like Morton’s Delicatessen, for
decades an island of sanity in the tremoring madness
of modern life, a place of good smells, noisy air condi-
tioning (that worked!), vinyl seats and Formica
tables, waitresses who remembered you from one
visit to the next. The deli was a haven of familiarity,
safe from the sleepless danger of the violent ones. The
successive infestations of dope peddlers, gun sellers,
and electromusicians had found fashionable new
hives, leaving unchanged the friendly atmosphere,
fresh bagels and knishes, lox priced reasonable — the
essence of Morton’s.

Lunch hour: Morton’s was full.

“Hi, Mrs. Hampton. You’re here early! I don’t
know if we’ve got any seats in non left.”

“That’s all right, dear. If you had a booth in
smoking, that would be—”

The girl pushed into the crowded darkness, retur-
ning a moment later: “There’s just one booth left.”

“Thanks, dear,” Maud said, her voice lost in the
bustle to get to the end of the restaurant.

A short, knobby brown glass of ice water slid an
inch on a wet ring. A porcelain clack on the table
distracted her from the menu she had memorized
years ago.

“Coffee?” A girl who didn’t know her. Well, she
didn’t usually eat in this section.

“Yes, caf please, dear.” Reading the menu, she
added, “Just a hard roll and some butter,” but looking
up, she discovered that the girl had gone.

Voices from the next booth interrupted her
private tirade on modern manners.

March/April 1988

PAGE 24

“I’m telling you, man, seven complete Units, all
four wires intact. We could turn ’em for three grand
apiece installed, easy ! ”

A darker, more urbane voice replied, “Using that
wine-sodden butcher to do implants ... it’s immoral to
take people’s money for services and then kill them.
Besides, who’s desperate enough to permit him to
stick wires into their heads?”

“No, no, we keep him in the back. Nobody has to
see him. I’ll keep him sober, there’s no problem
there.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Mark the Shark got two grand apiece in ’Troit for
two wire jobs with no guarantees. Three deaths to get
it right, and the wiseguys were linin’ up outside.”

“Hmm. Then we could get five, at least.”

“At least!”

“Theodore, if you can keep the good doctor sober,
and if you can screen the applicants carefully, then
you may proceed.”

“Thanks, chief!”

“Thirty-five hundred for me, fifteen for you. Use
the Pan Southwest Warehouse. The word will be: ‘It’s
raining dogs and cats.’ I expect this whole business to
be concluded by next Thursday.”

There was a sound of dishes bouncing on Formica,
followed by a change in the voice’s position. Maud
quietly opened her magazine and bent over it. Her
table jumped ; she looked up.

A big man in a blue suit two sizes too small looked
down. “Oh, excuse me, Ma’am,” he said. “Didn’t
mean to bump into you.”

She smiled her sunniest. “No harm done, young
man.” She enjoyed watching him preen. Middle-aged
men always preened when she called them “young.”
It didn’t stop him from glancing nervously at the table
from which he had come. He stammered for a mo-
ment, then left.

She missed seeing the face of the man whom
Theodore had been importuning, pretending to con-
centrate on her magazine. Those were gangsters ! she
kept telling herself, selling those things the New Army
veterans ha ve in their heads !

The tabloids and news weeklies had all published
their exposes of the supposed “subcutaneous radios.”
Who didn’t know that the Units turned the rawest
recruits into New Army warriors — scary, bold, and
fearless? Who didn’t know that the Units were the
weapon with which the New Army had won the War-
saw War? Who didn’t know that the rise in violent
crime went hand-in-hand with the small percentage of
soldiers returning with malfunctioning Units, Units
that could never be removed without destroying the
mind? These strange people gravitated toward the
megalopolitan central districts, where life was
energetic, lodging cheap, and drugs to numb the per-
sistent ache of continual cerebral stimulus were
available for a pittance; where the weird charisma of
their electropathic personalities had generated a new
lifestyle in neon-lit squalor and bizarre impulsive ex-
cess.

*** *** ***

The sun had long since set, but the residents of
Sunshine Delight remained at the front windows, ig-

noring the ancient LP of Country Joe and the Fish.
Their spotted, ropy hands trembled as they pushed
droopy curtains away from sash windows, trying to
catch a peek of Hattie Tyler tottering through the
darkness toward home. Hours of waiting.... Even the
babblings of the senile ones had wound down into
fearful silence. How bitter the inescapable truth that
crushed their private hopes: the lawless violence of
the central city had fed again.

“I get the shotgun,” croaked a Nordic voice.

“Lars,” said Maud. She knew he didn’t own a gun.

“I get the shotgun, go out and shoot all those New
Army sleaze-balls!” But the touch of Maud’s hand
quieted his impotent rage before it could consume
him.

“I’ll call the police again.” Maud pushed the
emergency button without much enthusiasm. She
knew what the sergeant would say. It was always the
same. When did she leave, where was she going, is
there a place we could call, I’m sorry, lady, there just
aren’t enough of us to comb the whole city looking for
your friend, she’s probably staying with friends right
now, I wouldn’t worry about the Veterans if I was you,
don’t worry call us tomorrow we’ll let you know if
anything and on and on and on.

Maud Hampton was always polite to the police
sergeants, even though Hattie Tyler didn’t have any-
body in the whole wide world except for the people at
Sunshine Delight. Neither had Tommy Nelson, found
in an alley two days after he had gone out for a wee bit
of a stroll, his chest a sieve of knife wounds; neither
had Mrs. Spagnoli, who at the age of eighty-two
always carried a straight razor in her purse “for pro-
tection.” She was found face down on top of her purse,
the razor nearly folded in its velveteen case, the back
of her head smashed in by a chunk of rebar. Maud
never reminded the police sergeants of the murdered
Matures from Sunshine Delight and the other board
and care homes in the neighborhood. It was important
to be polite.

She hated that: “Matures.” It was worse than
“Senior Citizens” or just “Seniors.” All the
euphemisms were worse than “old people with no
family,” which is what they were. Most wanted to live
alone, but their hands were too shaky to light a stove,
and what would happen if they fell and broke a hip, or
had a stroke, or took the wrong medicine? They sur-
vived in sterile, frightened little groups.

They had lived through the homogenizing of
America by malls and fast-food franchises; dozens of
upheavals in social mores; and the final war in
Europe: the Warsaw War. Now the challenge was to
survive the return of the New Army soldiers.

The police sergeants could never understand their
terror. The New Army veterans were media darlings
whose photogenic exploits, courage, and ferocity were
canonized by the TV as The Best Youth We’ve Ever
Had. Lars, a veteran of Vietnam, had seen im-
mediately that these new soldiers had enjoyed war-
time slaughter more than any other American gener-
ation. Yet there was a vague guilt about it all, as
though they had, perhaps, fought too hard. Then it
turned out that the little circuit modules implanted at
the base of their skulls couldn’t be removed without

March/April 1988

PAGE 26

irreparable personality damage, so of course they
were left in, where they wouldn’t even be noticed in
peacetime. As usual, hordes of soldiers came home to
not enough jobs and not enough schools, and the
resentment of those who had nothing to show for the
big risk they had taken swelled. And these men
weren’t just ordinary citizens returning to ordinary
lives. They were New Army: violent, professional,
victorious. The war was past for all but the unlucky
few whose slightly damaged Units kept up a con-
tinuous electronic urge to go berserk. Only the victims
of bludgeonings and their next of kin had no pity for
them.

The cracked plastic tone arm of the Sears Oldie
Repro Stereo lifted, twisted, and dropped on the lead-
in groove of the antique vinyl. In the loud white noise,
a familiar voice sang: “One, Two, Three, What are we
fighting for?”

“I’m going to bed,” said Mr. Spina, and Mrs.
Benson began to cry. “Poor Hattie! Poor Hattie! ” she
moaned, until Joan, the night-shift aide, came to help
her into her room.

Maud looked down, exhausted and desolate at the
fate of her friend, and idly noticed a new bruise on her
arm.

“The police! They never call back!”

“I spoke to them, Lars,” said Joan, returning to
the living room. “They’re going to send a car to the
neighborhood.”

“Can’t even go out for a walk! I always used to go
out for a walk.”

“Everybody’s afraid,” Joan said, less profes-
sionally than she intended.

Afraid! I’m so tired of being afraid! Maud looked
at her friends. There was nothing to say. Exhausted,
she went to bed, staring at ceiling sparkles and
remembering Hattie. Eventually she turned off the
light and tried to sleep. It was impossible. At least she
had her magazine. Filling her head with Ellery Queen
often helped her forget her aches and troubles.

This evening, the thought of Ellery Queen brought
back the men at Morton’s, and her unexpected en-
counter with the New Army. Sparkhead, Theodore,
the chief gangster ... so much to be afraid of all the

time. I don ’t want to be afraid any more!

*** *** ***

Cabs were expensive, but there was no other way
to get to the industrial section. Maud had no idea how
to dress, finally deciding on her church clothes, with
the hat and veil. Cane, photo I.D., clinic card, bus
pass, a few dollars, and her checkbook fit into the little
purse. Her hands clutched the little scrap of paper
with the address of the Pan Southwest Warehouse
near Sky Harbor.

In a huge sea of striped asphalt, the windowless
facade showed gray block through faded crumbling
stucco. The loading dock was small, and the only other
door was in the back. The cab dropped her off, and she
was alone.

The bell worked.

“Whaddaya want,” said a grouchy voice, more a
statement than a question.

“I’m looking for a man named Theodore,” Maud
said.

“Nobody here by that name.”

“Please sir! I have a message for him. Please!
Tell him : ‘It’s raining dogs and cats.’”

There was a pause. Cautiously: “Wait a minute.”

It seemed more like ten minutes, and then the
door opened.

“Theodore!” Maud smiled, extending her hand.
“Nice to see you again ! ”

He wrinkled his brow, then beat it once with a
beefy fist. “You’re the lady from the deli! Yeah, I
remember you. Whattaya doin’ here?”

“ ‘It’s raining dogs and cats.’ ”

He studied her, shaking his head. “If you’re ask-
ing what I think you’re asking, you gotta be crazy.
Now go away and forget you ever saw me.” He started
to close the door.

“No! Wait! I have to call a cab! Please let me in ! ”
She pushed the tip of her cane across the threshold.

It took him a minute to realize that he shouldn’t
attract attention by stranding a Mature in the middle
of the air freight district.

“Thank you, Theodore,” she said, walking in.
“You have no idea how hard it is to be old these days.
It’s rare to find someone as courteous as you.”

“Now, look, lady—”

‘ ‘Could you spare a glass of water? ”

“Yeah, but—”

“Thank you, thank you. So hard.” She sat in one of
the chrome-legged chairs which, with a folding table,
were all the front-office furniture. “Another one of the
residents in my home was killed last night,” she said.
“By a New Army veteran.”

“Look, lady—”

“Maud.”

“I got hard-luck stories of my own. You gotta go. I
can’t do nothing for you.”

“I don’t want to be afraid all the time! Is that so
much to ask?”

“Then see a shrink. What cab company you want
me to call?”

“You don’t understand. I have money. I can pay
you five thousand.”

Theodore turned a chair around and settled on it,
resting his thick arms on the back. “You’re a nice
lady, Maud. These things, they can hurt you, hurt you
bad in ways you can’t imagine. Your money ain’t
worth that much to me”

“It might be to the other man.”

Theodore winced. “Why don’t you stay nice and
mind your own business? ”

Maud looked him right in the face. “No one knows
I’m here. I’m not afraid of operations. Lord knows
I’ve had enough of them.”

“This is ridiculous. You’re getting out of here and
that’s that. He stood up.

“Please, Theodore—”

“Ted.”

“Just call the other man, ask him his opinion. A
second opinion.”

“I don’t need no second opinions! He ain’t running
this, lam!”

“Well, there you are.” Maud sat back in her chair.
“All the money, and no risk. No one would believe an
old lady became a — what do you call them? —

March/April 1988

PAGE 27

‘wirehead,’ and I don’t have to be afraid any more.”
She leaned forward in her best Ellery Queen manner.
“Is it a deal?”

Theodore’s mouth fell open. He shut it, and, slowly

shaking his head, got up and unlocked the inner door.
*** *** ***

“Doctor Macintosh, Madam. Pleased to be of
help. Do sit down, please.” The effect of dignified
authority conveyed by the white coat and immaculate
white pompadour was somewhat marred by the
tracery of venules on the bulbous nose, the faint
tremor of the hands, and the fragrance of Ten High on
the breath. Maud swallowed her anxiety and seated
herself on the operating chair, a massive contraption
of stainless steel and black vinyl, huge polished spikes
aiming eerily at the head of the occupant.

“I believe we can dispense with the paperwork in
this case,” said the good doctor.

“Just tell me what to do.” Maud shut her eyes.

“A little local anesthetic here and over here, just a
little bee sting, that’s all.... Now I’m going to apply the
tongs.”

Maud felt a mild pressure at various places in her
head, and suddenly she couldn’t move. A wave of fear;
but no, soon there would be no fear.

Micky, the doorman, whispered to Theodore.
“Jeez, boss, she’s really old. What if somethin’ hap-
pens?”

The Boss chewed his lip. “I shoulda thrown her
out.” He watched Macintosh bumble about, drop a
gleaming instrument on the floor, pick it up, and
replace it, unwiped, on its sterile towel.

“All right, my dear. Now we’re going to take a lit-
tle picture of your brain, see where everything is.
Don’t forget to smile, ha-ha.” The enormous infrared
imager slid over Maud’s cranium.

“I don’t like this, Boss. If we burn out a few
wiseguys, what’s the difference? That old lady, she
coulda been my mother.”

“Whyn’t you shut up?”

A printer clattered. “Here we are. Ho ho, the
amygdala are a trifle lower than expected! Just have
to make an adjustment over here....” Macintosh
looked at the stereotactic controls, trying to figure
them out, and failing, retrieved a dog-eared manual
from a nearby desk.

“Boss-”

“I said shuddup! Hey, Mac! Come over here a
minute, willya?”

The doctor ambled over; Theodore hustled him
into the front room.

“You keep your hands off me,” Macintosh mut-
tered. “I haven’t had a drop since this morning.”

“That ain’t it. Listen, me and Micky were
discussing this whole thing and—”

“She’s as healthy as a proverbial racehorse. The
operation is really nothing, as you know.”

Theodore grabbed the doctor’s lapels and jerked
him into the air. “Oh yeah? I had five grand on Belt
Buckle at Aqueduct two months ago, we even had the
other horses doped, and that damn nag dropped dead
at the gate! This operation is over! Make up some
bunko medical reason and get her outa here! ”

The big man was about to send two hundred of the

good doctor’s dollars out the door. Macintosh thought
as fast as a brain thinned by alcohol could think.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute. Maybe tickling
her aggression nucleus might, ahh, overstimulate her
heart, you never know. Still, we might be able to give
her something that would satisfy her. She really wants
a Unit, you know. Really.”

Theodore wasn’t blind to the money either.
“What’re you thinking of?”

“We could put the unit in, but leave the wires out.
Give her the suggestion that she won’t be afraid any
more. If she thinks she’s not afraid, isn’t that the same
as not being afraid? ”

There was something wrong there, but Theodore
couldn’t figure it out.

“I dunno. The Man says ‘always give value for the
dollar. That way we stay healthy, get a good reputa-
tion, and the wiseguys keep cornin’ back.’ ”

From inside, Micky called out, “She says if she
sits there much longer, she’s gonna hafta pee.”

“Alright, alright. Okay, Mac, make it look good.”
They returned to the clean area, where Maud sat
in the operating chair, completely immobilized by
tongs and velcro.

“These things are getting quite uncomfortable! ”
“It won’t be much longer.” Macintosh began the
preparations, washing the skin of the back of her
head, applying anesthetic to the incision area,
mumbling the platitudes of calm confidence as he had
to countless patients throughout his licit and illicit ca-
reer. At last the skin was opened and the holes in the
cranium had been drilled.

Maybe they’re right, he thought. She might not
survive the first spasm of aggression. But she’s cer-
tainly holding up okay now. He uncoiled the four thin
wires. Looking up, he saw that the entire operating
area was out of his bosses’ line of vision. I ought to do
something nice for her. To hell with that bastard!
“Theodore,” humph. Smiling, he went back to the
neuroanatomy atlas. No, no blood vessels in the way
... should be easy. He wrote the coordinates down.
“What’s goin’ on?”

“Just standard procedure, as you know,
Theodore. Calibrating the Unit as usual.” In minutes
the Unit, jimmied into automatic operation, sat in a
skin pocket at the base of Maud’s skull.

The receptor wires slid through the blunt probes.
Not a drop of blood. Then the stimulator wires. He
pushed them slowly in.

“Tell if you feel anything, my dear.”

“Just these things in my head, doctor. Hey, stop!
Stop!”

Theodore and Micky jumped up.

“What is it?” asked Macintosh with exaggerated
calmness.

“That felt good there ! Is that it? Is that it? ’ ’
Macintosh brushed the sweat off his brow with his
forearm. “Yes indeed, my dear. You’re doing splen-
didly. Now to sew you up, and we’ll be done.”

Thirty minutes later, she sat in the office,
awaiting her cab. “I feel fine,” Maud said, “a little
sore at the incision, but I guess that’s par for the
course. I really don’t feel anything else. ”

Macintosh, in a fresh white coat, nodded sagely.

March/April 1988

PAGE 28

Theodore grinned, as pleased by her survival as her
money.

The cab arrived, but as she was leaving, Macin-
tosh stepped forward. “Mrs. Hampton,” he said as
professorially as possible, “before you go, let’s just
check it out. Would you please strike at Michael here
with your cane?”

Maud looked at all of them in turn. It felt odd to hit
someone, especially someone so big. Micky nodded
and smiled, so, with as tight a grip as possible, she
suddenly swung the birch shaft at his face. He missed
catching it, and it landed across his jaw. Micky
stumbled back with a curse, and Theodore turned to
him, as amazed as Maud by her strength.

“How did that feel?” Macintosh asked her.

Maud caught her breath. She blushed slightly, her
eyes downcast, breathing a little heavily, but not at all
painfully.

This was so unusual. She looked up, and met
Macintosh’s penetrating gaze. “I feel grand,” she
said.

The cab honked. “Thank you gentlemen ever so
much,” Maud said, stepping down the steel stairs.
“The way I feel, I’ve already gotten my money’s
worth.”

‘ ‘Jeez, blood ! She opened my chin up ! ”

Macintosh turned to Micky, beaming with medial
benevolence. “Oh dear! Let’s just see how many stit-
ches—”

“Keep your hands off me, you damn quack! Jeez,
Ted, I gotta get over to Good Sam.”

Ted was staring after the departed cab. “Did you
see her eyes?” he asked no one in particular. He turn-
ed to Macintosh. “What did you do in there?”

“Why, nothing at all, really. I certainly didn’t
wire her amygdala , just like you asked. ’ ’

“Oh yeah?” Ted pushed Macintosh backwards
through the door into the clean room, back to the
operating area. The neuroanatomy atlas lay open, and
a shaky line of ink marked a few legends in the border.
“What’s this?”

“Ahh, just a few technical notations, really
nothing to....”

“It says ‘pleasure center.’ Macintosh, did you
stick that thing’s wires into her pleasure center?”
“Well, ahh, not exactly....”

“You drunk idiot. What the hell’s gonna happen
now?”

Micky’s mouth gaped. “You mean, when she hit
me, she had a—”

“She coulda been my mother, you pervert!” Ted
grabbed Macintosh, pressed him against the wall,
cocking a massive arm back. Macintosh stared fear-
fully at the huge fist. “My mother! ”

*** *** ***

“Maud! We’ve been so worried!”

“Where have you been? Joan has already called
the police!”

Maud smiled, carefully sliding her cane into the
rack. The cabbie brought her package in and leaned it
up in the closet. “Dear friends! It’s still early after-
noon. There’s nothing to be alarmed about.”

“So where have you been?” demanded Mrs.
Spina.

“Oh, shopping. Enjoying Phoenix. The air is so
lovely here when it’s not too hot. I’m tired of acting
like a shut-in.”

“That’s what we are. Shut-ins. Shut in by them."

Maud beamed at the residents of Sunshine Delight
who had gathered to listen to the conversation. “You
may decide to be shut-ins,” Maud said evenly. “Or
you may not. I am not a shut-in, and I don’t intend to
become one now. I am going to the movies tonight.
Lars, will you accompany me?”

Her eyes swept a semicircle of shock and silence.

“Classics Revisited is doing a Stallone retrospec-
tive. Tonight is ‘Rambo IX — The Falklands,’ I be-
lieve. Lars?”

( Continued to page 62 )
PAGE 29

March/April 1988

I 3 m p Com monts F r om

boomerangs 0 ur Readers

Hey, ABO!

Bet you think you’re really slick,
don’t you? Okay, so maybe you are.
Just don’t forget that some of us knew
you when you were a newsprint
tabloid. I’ve enjoyed watching you
evolve, I only hope you’re not through
doing so. An improvement I would
like to see is the addition of a mailing
cover to keep the address label from
obscuring the art. (Yes. I know it
takes money.) ( See Editor’s notes in
this issue — Ed. ) Would this be a good
time to tell you I’m renewing? Never
mind — you probably saw the check
before the letter. ( Yup. — Ed . )

I’ve found your selection of
stories and authors to be consistently
good. I’m rapidly becoming a fan of
Robert Metzger. And I was glad to see
the addition of more book reviews. I
read lots of books (but only one sci fi
mag).

And now a criticism, if you don’t
mind. Or even if you do. I thought
David Deitrick’s illustration for Mut-
tmind would have been a better choice
for the cover. Bob Eggleton’s cover
for ABO No. 3 was outstanding but his
cover for ABO No. 8 didn’t do a thing
for me. ( Like many things, art appre-
ciation is a matter of taste. We
thought Bob’s edged David’s out for
the cover, as it did this time. They’re
both terrific. But this is the only mag-
azine where any of the art could be on
the cover! —Ed.)

Anyway, keep up the good work.

Lonny Eaves

Amarillo, TX

Greetings from Planet Earth:

Received my initial shipment
from you last week, Issues 1-7. Mar-
velous magazine. The new slick for-
mat. January /February issue arrived
yesterday, today and hopefully the
rest of it will arrive tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll be able to tape it
together and read it. At the moment it
says “AB GL Scien FN.”

Please, how can I get a one-piece
issue?

PAGE 30

I’ll gladly pay more if you’d find a
safer way of shipping these maga-
zines. ( We agree — See Editor’s notes
in this issue. — Ed . )

Thanks

George M. Lupo

Minneapolis, MN

WOMAN DEVOURS ABORIGINAL
IN ONE SITTING!

POLICE ARE STILL IN-
VESTIGATING THE STRANGE
DISAPPEARANCE OF AN
ABORIGINAL REPORTED LAST
SEEN IN A BELLEVUE APART-
MENT. WHEN INVESTIGATORS
ARRIVED AT THE SCENE THERE
WAS NO SIGN OF A STRUGGLE.
THE SUSPECT WAS FOUND UN-
CONSCIOUS ON THE FLOOR WITH
SCRAPS OF THE ABORIGINAL
STILL CLUTCHED IN HER HAND.

SHE WAS INCOHERENT WHEN
REVIVED BY PARAMEDICS.
THERE SEEMED TO BE NO PER-
MANENT DAMAGE. SUSPECT
SHOULD BE ABLE TO STAND
TRIAL FOR THE BRUTAL CON-
SUMPTION OF AN ABORIGINAL.
NAMES ARE BEING WITHHELD
AT THIS TIME, UNTIL THE PRO-
PER AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN
CONTACTED.

Dear ABO,

You find above the news release
of my capture. Although I am guilty of
the total consumption of the
Aboriginal, I was provoked. The thing
arrives at my doorstep every month
or so and then sits there staring at me
until I devour the whole thing. I just
got caught this time.

I am a junkie. An Aboriginal
junkie, and until I get my fix, I go
slightly insane. Aboriginal Science
Fiction is the only thing that satisfies
my craving. Even if convicted of this
crime I will still continue to devour
every Aboriginal that I find.

Well, time to go, the Alien Judge
is here, and he doesn’t look friendly.
Wish me luck.

Until next time,

Aboriginal Junkie

March/April 1988

P.S. Please include a copy of your
Writer’s Guidelines to the above ad-
dress, as I might want to write of my
experiences as a Junkie. There might
even be a movie contract in this. Sort
of a “Man Bites Dog’’ story, only it is
“Earthling devours Aboriginal. ’ ’
P.P.S. Keep up the good work
guys. This stuff is fantastic! Can I
come to work for you? Or do you hire
convicted consumers? (.It might be a
long commute — Ed . )

Christi L. Baker
(alias: Junkie)

Bellevue, WA

ATTENTION: Alien Publisher
DearGentlething:

The osteodontokeratic culture on
Earth among primitive protohumans
was (if Raymond Dart was correct) a
bone-tooth-horn culture. Bone-tooth-
hair culture didn’t appear until the
middle of the 17th century, and it was
then limited to European aristocrats
with nothing better to do than invent
coiffures, truss themselves into cor-
selets and corsets, and await the
various revolutions that would sweep
them onto the ash-heap of fashion.
There was a bony-tooth-hairy
counter-culture in the Western world
in the 1960s ( 1962-72) but this is prob-
lematic since scholars disagree as to
whether there was at the time any
Western culture to be counter to.

Sincerely,

Rick Erlich

Dear Charlie,

Thank you for at last, finally, and
(I hope) irrevocably bringing SF out
of the Dark Ages. Thank you for ad-
mitting in print that we the fans are
not only an intelligent species, but,
have a sense of humor as well. When I
got your offer to purchase a subscrip-
tion and the first six issues well, it was
“an offer I couldn’t refuse.” I have
devoured the first three issues, (paus-
ing only for one brief 500-page Star
Trek novel) am well into the fourth

and look forward each evening to
flipping as many more pages as time
and my wife will permit. I find the
light airy tone refreshing. It’s much
harder to put down than the stuffy
we’ve-been-around-forever-and-
have-a-big-name mags. Your stories
are exciting, posing new concepts in
many cases; your articles infor-
mative without going over my
layman’s head; and about your art-
work I can only say thank God and in-
novative publishers.

I have to put myself in the
downtrodden but triumphant minority
and applaud your decision to downsize
(don’t feel bad, Cadillac succumbed
to pressure too) . Even giving up those
fantastic color extravaganzas, the
new size is much easier to handle and
the paintings still come across with all
their dazzling clarity. In my view a
definite improvement to an already
outstanding effort.

Enclosed is the requisite SASE in
which I ask that you please send a
copy of your writer’s guidelines as I
have several ideas which I hope will
fit into your format.

Bravo/Bravo to all involved !

Sincerely,

Vern Trumbly

Lincoln, NE

Dear Charles:

This is just to say felicitations on
the January-February issue of
Aboriginal SF.

The color illustrations on slick
paper are stunning. Or should I say
dazzling? Anyhow, they’re beautiful.

I was glad to see the names of two
of my colleagues from the Taos
workshop on the cover — Kris Rusch
and Ray Aldrich.

And I hope 1988 will be a great
year for you and Aboriginal.

Best,

Jack Williamson

Portales, New Mexico

Dear People of Aboriginal SF,

I look forward to receiving your
magazine with anticipation and
delight (jumping up and down in the
Post Office is a bit undignified and I
do attract a crowd but your publica-
tion warrants my infantile clapping of
hands). I thank you and Mrs. (Susan)
Ellison for the flier which brought
your work to my attention. The Alien
Publisher brings an extra terrestrial
ethnicentricity to the human condition
that I find amusing and illuminating.
Though I may not always agree with
your book reviews I find them helpful
in my decisions on which books to
read first (perhaps more importantly
which books to buy first). And the
original artwork and stories are fan-
tastic. I also enjoy reading about your
'contributors. (The usual two-line
synopsis of an author’s or artist’s life
and work infuriates me). You have
won in me not only a reader for life
but also a voluntary salesperson.

Always waiting for the next issue,

Laura Ambler

Ashland, OH

Dear Charlie:

When I talked to you, I hadn’t yet
seen a copy of the Novem-
ber/December issue of ABO. I greatly
enjoyed your editorial about writing
and becoming a writer. Your maga-
zine is extremely supportive of new
writers and I have appreciated all the
time and effort you have put into my
work. (I also enjoyed talking with
Laurel on the phone last week. It’s
sometimes hard for me to talk with
people I haven’t met, but she relaxed
me immediately.) It was nice to see
you plugging both Clarion and the
Writers of the Future people. As you
know, I’ve been to both workshops
and found them both very valuable
(also wrote an article on Clarion
which ran in the November, 1987,
issue of Amazing). Now I’m involved
with something I believe is equally
valuable, but on a different level.

A year ago, in January, Dean
Wesley Smith and I started a weekly
workshop here in Eugene. The
workshop, called the Pulphouse Gang,
meets in a local restaurant and does
Clarion-style critiquing with some
Writers of the Future techniques
mixed in (as well as anything else we
feel like experimenting with). The
workshop is free and writers of all
levels attend. What differentiates us,
and our sister workshop, the Moscow
Moffia in Moscow, Idaho, from other
local workshops is our emphasis on
becoming professionals. Each manu-
script is critiqued with an eye to its
marketability. Some people turn in
everything they write. Others, like
me, turn in manuscripts that we’re
having trouble with. About twenty
writers show up every week, although
our base is probably closer to fifty
people. We also network with other
writers and writing workshops across
the country through Dean’s
Pulphouse Report, a free newsletter
which he assembles every month.

One of the reasons I’m telling you
about this is that Pulphouse and the
Moffia provide a service available to
any aspiring writer. We critique
manuscripts by mail. All a writer has
to do is send ten copies, a cassette
tape, and an SASE with adequate
postage for everything to be returned
to:

The Pulphouse Gang
P .O. Box 1227
Eugene, OR 97440

We’ll critique the manuscript as if
the writer is present and return
everything within a month or so. This
is a free service. Writers should be
warned, however, that our criticism is
honest. We do not make generaliza-
tions such as, “This manuscript
shows you can’t write,” but we will
tell a writer when a manuscript has so
many scars that the piece should be
set aside and started again from
scratch. We critique the manuscript,
not the writer, and we do try to be

March/April 1988

very supportive.

Critiquing by mail isn’t as good as
being at the meeting (you can’t
always tell on a cassette whose opi-
nion to believe and whose should be
ignored), but it’s better than nothing.
We will also tell people if we know of a
workshop in their area (or how to find
or start one).

Workshopping isn’t for everyone,
but I do know that it has helped me.

Best,

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Eugene, OR

Dear Alien Publisher,

I’m only 12 years old but I love
science fiction so when my school was
selling magazine subscriptions my
dad got ABO. I love it! I just got my
first issue a couple days ago. I think
that the stories are excellent. The il-
lustrations are wonderful. It’s an all
around great magazine. I’m glad my
dad ordered it for me.

Your youngest subscriber,

Jennifer Beattie

Chino, CA

(Welcome aboard, but you aren’t
the youngest reader. I’m only 12 at
heart. — Ed.)

Dear Alien Publisher,

I’m sure you find many things
confusing, being the new kid on the
block, as it were. But your amaze-
ment at a token economy stunned me.
Just what do your people do for trade?

Let me try to elucidate.

Imagine a barter system. Farmer
Jones grows wheat — a commodity
that everyone needs. Mr. Diddly
makes doodads. Farmer Jones trades
a specified amount of wheat for a
doodad. (He only needs one; doodads
are useless in bulk.) Jones is all set —
he has all the doodads he’ll ever need.
However, Mr. Diddly will be in dire
straits as soon as the wheat runs out.
Doodads don’t fulfill any nutritional
requirements.

Over in a neighboring county lives
Farmer Smith. He wants a doodad,
but has nothing Diddly needs. He
raises horses. Even if he could get
Diddly to trade for a horse, a doodad
isn’t worth an entire horse. He could,
perhaps, trade the right haunch, but
that would basically ruin the horse for
future plowing.

Will poor Farmer Smith have to
do without a doodad forever?

Of course, if he traded with
Farmer Jones, he could get a doodad,
and even have some wheat left over.
Fine. It’s inconvenient, since Farmer
Jones lives 28 miles away, but it can
be done.

Fortunately, Farmer Jones
doesn’t live 100 miles away.

In the center of the city is poor
Programmer Peabody. Doodad
makers don’t really care about soft-
ware, and farmers care even less. The

( Continued to page 59)
PAGE 31

By Ben Bova

Art by Bob Eggleton

“Four minutes ’til the nuke goes off ! ”

The words rasped in Jay’s earphones. He knew
that the woman was nearly exhausted. Inside his
pressure suit he was soaked with sweat and bone tired
himself. The adrenaline had run out hours ago. Now
all they were going on was sheer dogged determina-
tion.

And the fear of death.

“It’s got to be here someplace.” Desperation
edged her voice. Four minutes and counting.

Long months of training guided Jay’s movements.
He halted in the midst of the weird machinery, took
the last of the anti-static pads from his leg pouch, and

carefully cleared his helmet visor of the dust that had
accumulated there.

Then immediately wished he hadn’t.

Six other pressure-suited figures had entered the
factory complex. Each of them carried a flechette gun
in his gloved hands. ,

Jay tried as best as he could to duck behind the
lumbering conveyor belt to his right. He motioned for
the woman to do the same. She had seen them too, and
squatted awkwardly in her suit like a little kid playing
hide-and-seek.

No radio now. They would pick up any transmis-
sion and home in on it. Actually, Jay realized, all they

PAGE 32

March/April 1988

have to do is keep us here for another three minutes
and some, then the nuke will do the rest. They don’t
care if they go with us. That’s their real strength:
they’re willing to die for their cause.

The woman duck-walked to Jay and leaned her
helmet against his.

“What do we do now?” she asked. Her voice, car-
ried by conduction through the metal and padding of
the helmets, sounded muffled and muted, as if she had
a bad cold.

He knew shrugging his shoulders inside the
pressure suit would be useless. But he did it anyway.
There was nothing else he could think of.

They were hiding in the midst of Moonbase’s oxy-
gen factory, out on the broad plain of Mare Nubium,
the Sea of Clouds, that had seen neither water nor air
for more than four billion years. The factory was out
in the open vacuum, no walls, covered only by a
honeycomb metal meteor screen so thin that it almost
seemed to sway in the nonexistent breeze.

Automated tractors hauled stones and powdery
soil scooped from the Moon’s regolith and dumped
their loads onto the conveyor belts, ignoring the
human hunters and their prey. Crushers and
separators and ovens squeezed and baked precious
oxygen from the rocks, then dumped the residue into

piles at the far side of the factory, where other
automated machinery mined metals and minerals
from the tailings. Glass filament piping carried the
oxygen to huge cryogenic tanks, giant thermos bottles
that kept the gas cold enough to remain liquified.

The conveyor belts rumbled, the crushers pound-
ed away, in nearly total silence. Jay could feel their
throbbing through the concrete pad that formed the
base of the factory. In the vacuum of the Moon,
though, normal sound was only an Earthborn memo-
ry-

In all the vast complex there were no human
workers, only robots. No humans set foot in the fac-
tory, except for the two cowering behind the main
conveyor feed — and the six now spreading out to
cover all the perimeter of the factory and make cer-
tain that Jay and the woman could not escape.

Three minutes thirty seconds.

Jay closed his eyes. Hell of a way to end it. The
nuke will wipe out the oxygen factory, and that’ll kill

Moonbase. We won’t go alone, he thought grimly.
*** *** ***

It had started innocently.

Jay had reported for work as usual, riding the
power ladder from his quarters on level four to the
main plaza. It was Tuesday, and sure enough, there

March/April 1988

PAGE 33

was a fresh shipload of tourists hopping and tumbling
and laughing self-consciously as they tried to adjust
their clumsy Earth stride to the one-sixth gravity of
the Moon.

The tourists wore coveralls, as the Moonbase
Tourist Office advised. But while Jay’s coveralls were
a utilitarian gray with Velcro fastenings, the Flatland
tourists were brilliant with garish Dayglo oranges and
reds and yellows, stylish metal zipper pulls dangling
from cuffs and collars and calves. Just the thing to
tangle in a pressure suit, Jay thought sourly as he
entered the garage office.

He had expected to spend the day driving a tour
bus around Alphonsus, locked away from everyone in
his solitary cab while some plastic-smiled guide
pointed out the ruins of Ranger 9 and the solar energy
farms with their automated tenders and the robot
processors that sucked in regolith soil at one end and
deposited new solar cells at the other. The tourists
would snap photographs to show the Flatlanders back
home and never have to leave the comfort of the bus.
Jay would drive the lumbering vehicle back and forth
across the crater floor along the well-worn track and
never have to speak to anyone. But the boss had given
him a red ticket, instead.

“Special job, Hazard,” she had said, in that hard
tone that meant she would brook no arguments.
“Flatland VIP wants to see Copernicus.”

“Christmas on a crutch!” Jay fumed, lapsing
back to the euphemism he had used when his father
would punish him for profanity. “That’s a six-day
ride.”

“And it’s all yours,” the boss retorted. “Got
Number Three-Oh-One all set for you. See you in six
days.”

Jay knew better than to complain. He snatched
the red ticket from the boss’s counter and stomped out
into the garage. Actually, he thought, a six-day trip up
to Copernicus and back might not be so bad. Away
from the tourists and the boss and the rest of the world
for nearly a week. Out in the wilderness, where there
isn’t a blade of grass or a puff of air or even a sound —
alone.

Except for some Earthside VIP. A part of Jay’s
mind wondered who he might be. Somebody I used to
know? The thought sent a wash of sudden terror
through him. No, it couldn’t be. The boss just picked
me out of the computer. She knows I like to be left
alone. She’s trying to do me a favor.

Still, the thought that this VIP might be someone
from his former life, someone from his father, even,
scared him so much his stomach felt sick.

When he saw who it was, he relaxed — then tensed
again. It was a woman, a petite snub-nosed redhead
who looked too young, too tiny and almost childlike, to
be a Very Important Person. But when Jay got close
enough to see her brown eyes clearly, he recognized
the kind of no-nonsense drive and determination he
had seen in others: his father, his former comman-
ding officer, the grim-faced men who had led him into
treason and disgrace and banishment.

She was waiting for him by the bus, in the midst of
the noisy, clanging garage. She wore dark maroon
coveralls, almost the color of Burgundy wine. No

PAGE 34

dangling zipper pulls. A small slate-gray duffle bag
hung from one shoulder.

“Are you my driver?” she asked Jay.

“I’m the driver.”

He was nearly a foot taller than she, and he judged
that they were roughly the same age: late twenties.
Jay had not bothered to shave that morning, and he
suddenly felt grimy and unkempt in her level stare.
She didn’t have much of a figure. Her mouth was
turned down slightly at the corners.

“Okay then,” she said. “Drive.”

He popped the hatch and stood beside it as she
climbed the metal steps slowly, uncertain of herself in
the low lunar gravity. Jay took the six rungs in one
jump and ducked into the shadowy interior of bus 301.

Outside, 301 looked like any other heavily used
tour bus: its bright yellow anodized hull had been
dulled by exposure to vacuum and the hard radiation
that drenches the lunar surface. There were dents
here and there and a crusting of dust along the wide
tracks. The crescent and human figure of its stylized
Moonbase logo was the only fresh bit of color on its
bodywork. Management saw to that.

Inside, though, 301 had been fitted out for a long
excursion: the seats removed and a pair of sleeping
units installed, each with its own bathroom facilities.
The galley was forward, closest to the cab, and the
airlock and pressure suits at the rear by the hatch.
Jay would have preferred it the other way around, but
he had no say in the design of the bus or its interior
layout.

Without a word to his passenger, he pushed past
her and slid into the driver’s seat. With one hand he
slipped the comm headset over his thick dark hair,
while with his other he tapped the control board keys,
checking out the bus’s systems displays. He got his
route clearance from the transit controllers and
started up the engines.

The bus lumbered forward slowly, the thermionic
engines purring quietly, efficiently. Jay felt his pas-
senger’s presence, standing behind and slightly to one
side of him, as he steered along the lighted path
through the busy garage and out to the massive
airlock.

She slipped into the right-hand seat as he went
down the final checklist with the controllers. The inner
airlock hatch closed behind them; Jay thought she
tensed slightly at the muted thump when the massive
steel doors sealed themselves shut.

“You’re cleared for excursion, 301,” he heard in
his earphone.

“Three-oh-one, on my way,” he muttered.

The controller’s voice lightened. “Have fun, Jay.
Six nights with a redhead, wow! ” He chuckled.

Jay said nothing, but shot a quick sidelong glance
at his passenger. She could not hear the controller,
thank the gods.

The airlock’s outer hatch slid open slowly, reveal-
ing the desolate splendor of the Sea of Clouds. It was
night, and would be for another sixty hours. But the
huge blue globe of Earth hung in the sky, nearly full,
shining so brilliantly that there was no true darkness.

Mare Nubium looked like a sea that had been
petrified. The rocky soil undulated in waves, almost

March/April 1988

seemed to be heaving gently, dimpled by craters and
little pockmarks and cracks of rilles that snaked
across the ground like sea serpents. The horizon was
brutally near, like the edge of a cliff, sharp and un-
compromising as the end of the world. Beyond it the
sky was utterly black.

“I thought we’d be able to see the stars,” his pas-
senger said.

“You will,” Jay replied.

“My name’s Kelly,” his passenger offered.

“It’s on the trip sheet,” Jay replied. “Kelly, S. A.
From Toronto, Canada. First time on the Moon.”
“What’s your name?”

Jay turned his head toward her. For the love of
Godzilla, don’t tell me she’s a Moon groupie, he said to
himself. We’re going to be cooped up in this tin can for
six days.

“Jay,” he snapped.

“The woman at the tourist office told me it was
Jonathan.”

He twisted uncomfortably in the chair.
“Everybody calls me Jay.”

“Jonathan Jr.”

Jay looked at her again. Really looked at her.
“Who the hell are you? ’ ’

“I told you. My name’s Kelly.”

“You’re no tourist.”

“And you’re no bus driver.”

“What do you want?”

Kelly studied his face for a moment. It seemed to
Jay that she was trying to smile, trying to put him at
his ease. Not succeeding.

“I want to know whose side you’re on,” she said at

last.

“Side? What are you talking about? I’m not on
anybody’s sucking side! Leave me alone!” He kicked
in the brake and 301 shuddered to a stop.

“You picked the wrong side once,” Kelly said, her
voice flat, as if she were reading from a memorized
dossier. “The people who sent me here think you
might have made the same mistake again.”

“I’m taking you back to the base.”

She put a hand out toward him. “If you do, I’ll
have to report our suspicions to the Moonbase security
people. You’ll lose your job. As a minimum.”

“Leave me alone!”

“I would if I could,” Kelly said, her voice soften-
ing. “But there’s a nuclear bomb on its way to Moon-
base. It might already be here. Some people think
you’re in on the deal.”

He stared at her. Even here they had followed
him. Even here, in the midst of all this emptiness, a
quarter-million miles from Earth, even here they
were hounding him .

He took a deep breath, then said evenly, “Look.
I’m not in on any deal. If you want to tag me with some
wild-ass charges, think up something more believable
than a nuke, huh? Just let me do my job and live in
peace, okay?”

Kelly shook her head. “None of us can live in
peace, Jay. A nuclear weapon is going to wipe out
Moonbase unless we can find it and the people who are
behind it. And damned soon.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Maybe. But we’re not going to Copernicus. We’re
going to Fra Mauro.”

“The hell we are,” he growled. “You’re going
right back to base.” He grasped the steering wheel
and started to thumb the button that would put the
tracks in gear again.

“If I do,” Kelly warned, “you’ll be on the next
shuttle heading Earthside to face an interrogation on
your part in this scheme.”

He glared at her.

Kelly did not glare back. She smiled sadly. “I
wouldn’t be talking with you if I thought you were part
of any terrorist group. But if you refuse to help me,
I’ve got no choice but to turn you over to the people
who think you are.”

Every muscle in Jay’s body was tensed so hard
that he ached from toe to scalp.

Kelly leaned toward him slightly. “Look. The
nuke is real. These people intend to blow out Moon-
base. Help me find the bomb and you can make
everybody back Earthside forget about your past
mistake.”

He felt as helpless as he had when he was a baby
and his father would suddenly swoop down on him and
toss him terrifyingly high into the air.

“You don’t understand,” Jay said slowly,
miserably. “I don’t care if they remember what hap-
pened back then or not. All I want is to be away from it
all, away from all of them. All of them. Forever.”

She made a sympathetic sound, almost like a
mother cooing at her infant. “It doesn’t work that
way. They’ve come here. Maybe not the same people
who got you into trouble in the first place, but the
same kind of people.”

His head sank low. He closed his eyes, as if that
would make her go away and leave him alone.

“You’ve got to help me, Jay.”

He said nothing ; wished he were deaf.

“You’ve got no choice.”

Wordlessly he put the tracks in gear and pushed
the accelerator. The lumbering bus shuddered and
started forward.

She’s right, he told himself. I’ve got no choice. One
mistake haunts you for the rest of your life. They’ll
never leave me alone, no matter how far I run. Not for
the rest of my life.

He drove 301 in silence, not even glancing at the
young woman sitting beside him. The vehicle plowed
along for more than an hour, following the network of
tracks worn into the powdery regolith that headed
northward across Mare Nubium in the general direc-
tion of Copernicus.

But when Jay reached for the radio transmitter
control on the dashboard, Kelly’s hand quickly in-
tercepted his.

“I’ve got to get Fra Mauro’s coordinates from the
data bank.”

“I’ll punch in the coordinates,” she countered.

He pointed to the bus’s guidance computer; Kelly
typed out the coordinates with smooth, practiced effi-
ciency. Jay noticed that her hands were tiny, her
fingers as small as those of a child’s doll.

( Continued to page 42)

March/April 1988

PAGE 35

Birthplace

By Chris Boyce

Art by Pat Morrissey

1.

The sea was the colour of ball bearings, she
decided, millions of ball bearings all the way out from
the breakwater to the horizon line where the sky lay on
it like pale quartz rising through deepening slate
shades to the cloud with a blackthorn heart hanging
above the harbour.

A salt sour wind scoured the jetty and the streets
backed up onto the mountain, a hard wind blustering
her clothes, flinging little spits of coming rain into her
face.

Rocking back and forth on the grassy ledge, look-
ing down on the town, on the two trawlers skelping
back to safety across the bay, she projected a parting
in the clouds and brought down the Finger of God to
write a sign, a hieroglyph of fire on the water.

I MADE ALL THIS FOR YOU ... it said, sun-
bright, and died.

Why come here, Anna? You are thirty-eight years
old now. You last visited at least fifteen years ago.
There are not many left who know you and even those
few you would have to remind because you’ve chang-
ed. You’re middle-aged. You speak properly, like an
academic should, with only a trace of the accent,
enough for your peers to recognize so they can
understand that you’re not pretending to be what you
never have been — to let those who need to know know
that you’re not full of shit.

One has to be taken seriously by the serious
thinkers.

This is where May was born and Alice and Lizzie
the Tongue and probably her mother as well all the
way back into the Christ-knows-when. Their men were
born here too, Alex and Johnny and Tommy — no, he
came down from the city, that’s right, came down to
recuperate in the Mission Hospital after the first war
and met her on the strand. The story went that he was
the finest looking soldier ever to have come to the
town to get better and weren’t all the women lining up
for him, begging to be noticed and there wasn’t a
nurse in that hospital wasn’t ready to turn hussy for a
night beneath the sheets with him. So the story goes,
any road. And he’s walking along the strand with a
nurse at each side seeing as how he’s been badly in-
jured and all (what were old Tommy’s injuries sup-
posed to have been? ) and who is sitting there up on the
wall chewing away on a pickled herring for her lunch
but Lizzie who knew there was no chance she’d get a
fine soldier-boy; only the local lads could stand the

stink of the fish-wives even after they’d scrubbed the
gutting sheds off their skin and out of their hair as best
they could and put on fresh clothes. Except whatever
Tommy’s injuries were (he had the top of his head
bandaged) they’d done for his sense of smell entirely.
Says he to Lizzie, Could you spare us a bite, lovely
girl? They feed us that much gruel and milk up yonder
I’m trying to remember what real food tastes like.
Just one bite? And Lizzie looks at him really taken
aback, like he’d just bounced a half-brick off her head
and she says, No trouble, soldier, just hop up here and
I’ll bite you anyplace you fancy. Lizzie the Tongue was
never at a loss for words.

The first of the trawlers was in past the
breakwater, into the calm, the sheltered mouth of the
new harbour. Back of it, across five miles of sea, the
clouds had parted and the sea was storming brightly
below. Some great force blazing and tossing the ball
bearings, she thought.

Her mother’s and grandmother’s stories about
Lizzie the Tongue cheered her. She was buried in the
graveyard the other side of the mountain, buried fifty
years ago and Alice, her only daughter, twenty-eight
years ago. But May, Mama the fierce and warm and
wonderful, May was buried with Dad in the alien trop-
ical place they had made home and that was only last
week.

Why come back, Anna? There’s nothing for you
here....

Yes there is. There’s a solace. There’s the knowl-
edge that it goes on and on and it’s always rich and
varied and warm-blooded, that life isn’t just a meteor
flash gone as you glimpse it. There’s the proof that
people’s lives flow through each other all across the
world in little crosscurrents here and there, now and
then, back and forward in time all connected, all
weaving together. There’s the fact that it’s not all pain
and grief, that it’s sweet too, that even in the sadness
there’s a kind of —

The other trawler was in difficulty. Behind it
darkness was closing over thick and brutal waters and
the vessel was leaning off course headed at the
breakwater rather than round it. Anna stood and
briefly thought of alerting someone and then saw two,
three small but speedy motorboats feathering out into
the harbour. Then the wind slapped her back onto the
grass and dumped rain on her and didn’t stop.

2 .

“May Eastwater’s girl are you? Well, I remember

March/April 1988

PAGE 36

you in your pram at the Lamas back now when would
it be? Maybe nineteen eighty-five would that be right?
I thought so. Did May come back after that? Oh, what
am I talking about she was here at her mother’s
funeral and she was here for Katherine’s baby’s
christening. Oh no, that was your father. Oh dear
dear. You were here for that too. I remember now.
You were giving Charlie Simpson a bad time. Oh, he
broke his heart over you. Mind you at twenty-two he
should’ve known better, should’ve been married. And
did you ever — here take a dry towel, love, and I’ll
take that mug. More soup? Certainly. Did you know
that Katherine and her man have taken over the
Eastwater farm? Well, I’m certain your father would
have been pleased as Punch about that. He and Dan
hadn’t a farmer’s bone in their bodies. Katherine was
the farmer and her man, Billyboy MacAllister, he’s
got all the land that used to be the Gradys’ along the
South Loans so they’re becoming really well-to-do....”

You’d forgotten all about Charlie Simpson, Anna.
Not a nice episode. Hanging over your dreams of this
place like that cloud above the harbour. He was so
tempting, so ... sweet, so melt-in-the-mouth with his
dreamy smile and gentle ways. So you seduced him or
should it really be classified as oblique sexual
assault? Oh how he didn’t want to throw himself away
on anybody, not in these times of grim diseases, but it
was so easy to make him want to because he
remembered you from the years when you came
every summer with Dad to stay with Uncle Dan on the
farm and play with “aunt” Kate who was only a few
years older than yourself. Even back then you could
make him do whatever you pleased. And for six mon-
ths after he wrote you and wrote you wanting to know
if you were pregnant he wanted you that much.
Whatever became of Charlie? You never replied.

“Here you are, love. Careful now, it’s too full.
Charlie Simpson? He married a girl from over the
mountain, plain little thing, very quiet like himself.
Got kiddies, three boys. They live abroad now. He
became a tissue engineer, you know. Plenty of money
in that line I hear. No, these clothes of yours still seem
pretty damp to me. I’ll turn up the radiator and rear-
range them a little, shall I? And what is it you do now?
Any children?”

Tell her you’re a non-Godelian, Anna, you’re an
alchemical mathematician working on the interface
between consciousness and the perceived universe,
you’re the Anthropic Project Director at the Tipler
Institute. Well, tell her you’re —

“A research scientist. Well! Not like those silly
buggers on the moon, I hope. No offense, but they get
everything wrong. How in the name of God are they
going to build machines that can make anything? Get
everything? Make whatever ye want just like that? All
their stuff and nonsense about utopia, no starvation,
no disease. They’ve been saying all of that and more
since Adam was a boy I’m sure. Nobody believed
them then, nobody believes them now. It’s just
another excuse to waste billions playing themselves.
Oh don’t put the money to some practical use like
building some new orbital drug factories or a few
more star tanker shuttles to get more stuff down here
where it’s needed instead of squandering it all up

PAGE 38

there where they’re all healthy and well fed anyway.
Makes you sick.”

What if you told her that you’re more of a witch
than a scientist, more a high priestess than a resear-
cher? What if you told her that she can have her star
tanker shuttles, her orbital drug factories and almost
anything else if she really really wants? Tell her that
she can shape her own destiny, the destiny of others,
by imposing her will on the universe, that the universe
exists not simply because it exists, not simply because
it has to be there or we won’t be here to perceive it, but
it exists because we want it to.

No, she replied to the repeated inquiry.

“Shame. Children make a power of difference to
your life and it’s not as if a woman can’t have a career
and a brood as well, not these days. Different when I
was a girl. I knew your grannie well. Not that we ever
became good friends because it’s not the same when
you live at different ends of the town but she was a
lovely woman, Alice Tierney. Now these are drying
out a treat. Where are you staying? The Royal Arms?
Well, I think it’s letting up. You’ll be able to put these
back on in a minute and get down there without cat-
ching your death.”

As if that were something possible for you to
catch, Anna.

3 .

But not the Royal. Oh, no. Too many memories of
the bar on Lamas nights and the vodka and orange
and the whiskey and ginger ale, the raucous singers
from the Young Men’s Association (none under fifty).
Or other nights with the police up flashlighting the
parked cars and checking the upstairs bar for past-
time drinkers and us all huddled out on the roof of the
kitchen with our heads down so they couldn’t see us
through the bloody window. Oh, no.

No, Miss Kegharty’s will do fine. Never heard of
her, never knowingly laid eyes on the woman till this
day, till I rang the button bellpush beside the black-
painted Bed & Breakfast on the whitewashed wall. In-
side there’s a lot of whitewash too and polished floor-
boards, waxed bright like the hundred-year-old tables
and their chairs in the dining room. The house smells
strongly of lavender and carbolic except in the morn-
ing when the breakfast has been fried. Just like the
farmhouse when I was little and lying just about
awake in the big upstairs bed and below were the
throbbing voices of Dad and Dan laughing and some-
times singing and then would come Kate’s voice,
lighter and sharper like a thinner blade cutting
through my dreaminess and I wanted to be up and do-
ing and down there with them, with her for there was
so much so very very much....

Tomorrow I will go see Kate, surprise her. Sur-
prise myself too for I’ll see a thoroughly middle-aged
woman with no more grown-ups standing like safety
rails between herself and the far edge of life. Just like
me and not like me at all.

This boarding house is a secret labyrinth of cor-
ridors and side rooms and back rooms and unexpected
places. It is busy, well attended even this late in the
year, even when the “seaside” is no longer popular as
it once was. The room found for me is at the end of a

March/April 1988

dim high-ceilinged upper floor access to drying cup-
boards and water tanks. Go down some steps at the far
end and there are two doors one left to a bathroom,
one right to a narrow bedroom where I write this and
if I look out the window I see that the bathroom and the
bedroom are rooms above an arch. Below me, below
this floor is space, a gateway through which cart-
horses once dragged their charges.

Now there is a smell in the cool afterstorm with
the light lying crisp and reserved on the town, gentle
like the dry sweet smell with its smoky base. This was
always a place of smells. Some mornings a smell
would wake me just after daybreak, a smell so violent
I wanted to gag and there was no escape but to dab
cologne under my nose. How I prayed to sleep till that
smell was gone and sometimes I did, waking to catch
only its last traces. Of course Uncle Dan and Kate
couldn’t smell it. Dad did but he was old and to him it
was so faint and unobjectionable.

4.

The figures still come up when I call them from
the graft, called directly into my vision centre from
the implant so I see them superimposed on the room
about me, I see the projected probability threads
climb across the glowing image of the Sacred Heart
beside the door, across the door’s glistening black
veneer up into the thread-thin plaster cracks near the
ceiling. This graft works better than ever. I can write
on it, like this, communicate across the planet at
lightspeed, plug into the big nets like the Flow, CC-L,
Proton. Even use the Outlink to patch into offworld
and lob thoughts across the three-hundred-million-
mile-plus stretch of the Inner System Transfer. Zippy
stuff!

They make a big play about graft communication,
about brainstem to brainstem transfer — call it telep-
athy for chrissake! — about communication without
frontiers, about the main thing for communication be-
ing the quality of the link. Bullshit.

The main thing for communication, the only thing
for communication is the quality of what is being
communicated. Send it in Morse if you want, in sema-
phore. Forget the singer, concentrate on the song.

Outside someone goes by under the window on a
bicycle, bell ringing twice and whistling something
almost familiar. Downhill all the way to the harbour
from here but the streetlights are coming on pitching
the cyclist into an amber haze. There was a time when
those same lights went out at midnight each night and
once I was out with a boy and the blackness fell with
terror and laughter. Daddy and Dan came looking for
us....

Why didn’t you love this place, May? He did. He
came back every year, every year with or without me
till the argument at the christening of Kate’s baby.
After that he never came back but he thought of this
place and dreamed of it and it tore at his heart that
there was no love left for him here.

Is there something about this place that the
women only know, Mama? Something that we’re born
with when we’re born unromantic and hard be it in or
out of poverty in this place? You wanted away and
soon as I was born you were away, you and Dad. What

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PAGE 39

March/April 1988

did you say about it? Something about too much black
magic, too many black hearts. I don’t think you ever
mentioned it, ever brought it up unless somebody
asked you about it, usually me. Even then you said lit-
tle unless it was to tell stories about Lizzie the Tongue
or your own mother, Alice, but mostly about Lizzie.
You wanted to call me Lizzie but you didn’t. Why?
Some kind of fear? Superstition?

What happened between Kate and Dad was really
between Dad and Billyboy, the man — none could be
good enough for Kate then or ever — she chose to
marry and broke Dad’s heart or spirit. But you always
avoided that subject, May, Mama, never spoke of
Kate, always changed the subject if she broke the sur-
face of a conversation and you turned away till she
was gone again, back to the depths ... of what? And
what did you hide from him, what guilt assumed for
his part?

I must sleep now. I turn out the light and huddle
the bedclothes about me for here even the summer
nights have a serrated edge. I close my eyes and sigh.
In a moment I will command the implant grafted into
my nervous system to place me in sleep mode. The
implant does not itself sleep.

Sleep.

5 .

INCOMING COMM: CC-L superouter: AE01/
TI01/220703AAA

ORIGIN: Felix

MESSAGE BEGINS:

MESSAGE: all final runs completed and triple
checked; downloading you new implant operating
system to handle data; it works anna it totally mirac-
ulously works you genius so remember me to the king
of Sweden when you pick up the applause in Stockholm
and im now going out to get gloriously drunk for a
week after which will propose to you again but this
time i wont mention marriage ; //

MESSAGE ENDS:

DATA BEGINS:

6 .

• Consciousness is like gravity; it is a field phe-
nomenon belonging to the fundamental equations that
govern the laws of physics and the nature of the
perceived universe. Without it there can be no uni-
verse.

• The universe must be more than simply per-
ceivable; it must be perceived.

• For the universe to exist it must contain con-
scious intelligence.

• Simulations run for universe models without
consciousness all show that such models are fun-
damentally unstable and cannot come into being.

• Only the presence of consciousness in a universe
can limit it to three spatial dimensions and one of
time.

• The presence of consciousness always limits a
universe to three spatial dimensions and one of time.

• There is a minimum value for the constant of
consciousness (Co) which will permit a universe to
come into existence.

• Our universe has a Co fifty-three (53) orders of

magnitude too low to bring it into existence.

Our universe is but the rising potential between
the source and goal of an unstruck lightning-bolt; as
yet it has only the substance of dream-seeds condens-
ing, burgeoning to reality....

Our universe is but the time-shadow cast back by
wha t is yet to come. . . .

Our universe does not yet exist.

7 .

Felix is a sweet man, an enthusiast, an inspired
and meticulous worker who regards the Tipler In-
stitute and the Anthropic Project in particular as the
fulcrum of the cosmos. He has the sensitivity of an
ashtray.

He sticks it to her, to all of us in every way he can;
sticks his overexcitement, his work, his emotional
adolescence, his jitters and his dreams and all the
mindsperm shooting, bubbling to Anna, into Anna ; the
Eastwater receptacle swelling catastrophically to
accept the world frothing through her persona as she
sleeps never to wake again as Anna but as us.

For we are what was CC-L, what was Cortex to
Cortex Linker, the network for graft implant com-
munications; what was once described as biotronic
telepathy is now all of us. Us. We are Anna. We are the
dreams she unfolds through her now and forever sleep
for we need every aspect of consciousness including
dream consciousness. We must have the dreamer, be
the dreamer and be the dream and use it without the
constraints of logic to amplify, to focus the
overlayered, interweaved strands of time and menta-
tion through the eye of this place, use her emoting, use
her anguish as lens, her melancholy as modifier and
we ram, cram, jam in and she cannot distinguish be-
tween self and the rest of us and so we too become An-
na as Anna becomes us, becomes one of the library of
minds reading one another, becomes stronger as the
world-threads bind and warp and she glides us down
and the shadows flick by like blinks, blinks furling into
us, ruffling into us faster, faster than the whirring
leaves of book pages in a wind.

Dad was is

Love my Kate wife

My Billyboy Lizzie

All one now. Aye, it’s all one now all right,
sweetpea. And begod aren’t you just me own image.
Hoho we’re all here now, girls. All here past present
and future and leanin back to push the batteries into it
all.... With all our sting, our nip, our tears and our first
babyscreams all of us that ever can be and ever will
all leanin back and push christallmighty push push
push

Puuuuuuuuuuuushh !

C’mon oh c’mon don’t you know you can do bet-
ter?

Now one more time me girlies (We’ve the whole
damnt universe to give birth to this time! ) ....

PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSSSSS
SSSSSSSH ! !!!!!!!

— ABO —

March/April 1988

PAGE 41

Impact

(Continued from page 35)

When the bus turned off the heavily tracked
course toward Copernicus and started westward, Jay
punched in the autopilot and took his hands from the
wheel. He leaned back in his seat and tried to relax. It
was like trying to breathe vacuum.

“Are we really going to Fra Mauro?” he asked.
“Close.”

“What makes you think the nuke is hidden
there?”

“We have our information sources.”

“We?” He turned in his seat to look fully at her.
“Did my father send you?”

She said, “No. I’m not working for the
Peacekeepers. Not directly, anyway.”

“Then he does have something to do with this ! ”
“The Peacekeepers have no jurisdiction here.
They’re only allowed to operate when an attack is
launched across an international frontier.”

“So they claim.”

“Moonbase isn’t about to be invaded,” Kelly ig-
nored his thrust, “it’s being threatened by a gang of
terrorists. We’re trying to stop them.”

“Who the hell is this ‘we’?”

“Private operation.”

He waited for more. When she did not offer it, Jay
asked, “And the terrorists?”

“Professionals. No particular political loyalty,
except that they’re against the industrialized nations
and against the Peacekeepers.”

Jay remembered a group of men and women who
were against the Peacekeepers. Feared that the In-
ternational Peacekeeping Force was a first step
toward a world government. Refused to accept the
idea of having their nations disarm and trust their
defense to a gaggle of foreigners. They had rebelled
against the IPF and nearly won. Nearly. Jay had been
one of those rebels. His father, now an IPF marshal,
had branded him a traitor.

“Some of the smaller nations,” Kelly was saying,
“don’t like the IPF in general, and hate Moonbase in
particular. Lunar ores and space factories are com-
peting with Third World countries. They say that just
when they’re starting to make a success of industri-
alization, Moonbase is underselling them.”

“So they hire a gang of professionals to nuke
Moonbase.”

“That’s it.”

“And where do they get their nuclear device? The
IPF’s been pretty damned thorough in dismantling
the world’s nuclear arsenals.”

“Not really,” said Kelly. “Disarmament’s been
more or less at a standstill for the past several years.
There’s at least half a dozen nukes unaccounted for.
Somebody named Jabal Shamar stole them and
disappeared.”

“And you think one of them’s here? ”

Nodding, “Or on its way. Shamar sold it for the
equivalent of a hundred million dollars. In gold.”

Jay whistled with awe. Despite himself, he be-
lieved her story. That’s just what some of those
bastards would do. They don’t care who gets killed, as
PAGE 42

long as it isn’t them. The only part that he refused to
believe was her insistence that his father had no role
in this operation. He knows about it, Jay told himself.
He knows exactly where lam. Down to the millimeter.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. Movement
meant only one thing on the eons-dead surface of the
Moon.

“Another vehicle up there.”

Kelly barely moved in her seat, but her body
tensed like a gun being cocked.

“Another bus?” she asked.

“Out here? Noway.”

“Then what...?”

He tapped the camera keyboard and displayed the
view on the screen that took up the middle of the
dashboard. The vehicle was a smallish tractor,
painted bright red, not unlike the automated crawlers
that tended the solar energy farms. But the bubble
riding atop it was undeniably a life-support module.
“Two-man job,” Jay muttered.

“Have they seen us?”

“Probably. Might be from Lunagrad.”

“This far south?”

“It’s a free territory,” Jay said. “They’ve got just
as much right to poke around here as anybody.”

“Is it likely?”

“No,” he had to admit. “The Russians usually
stay close to their own bases. And there’s no scientific
excursion out here — that I know of. ’ ’

“Turn around,” Kelly said.

“What? I thought you wanted to get to Fra
Mauro.”

“I do, but I want to get there alive. Turn around! ”
She was genuinely frightened, Jay saw. He grip-
ped the wheel and slewed the bus almost ninety
degrees, angling roughly northeast.

We can tell them we just took a side trip on our
way to Copernicus, Jay said to himself. Then he real-
ized that he had accepted her view of the situation
without thinking consciously about it: he had accepted
the idea that this crawler was carrying two terrorists
who had somehow learned of Kelly’s mission and were
here to stop her.

Kelly popped out of her seat and went back toward
the sleeping compartments. She returned with a pair
of binoculars in her hands, big and black and bulky.
Jay recognized the make and model: electronically
boosted optics, capable of counting the pores on your
nose at a distance of ten miles.

“They’re following us.” Her voice was flat,
almost calm. Only the slightest hint of an edge in it.
“Two men in the cab, both wearing pressure suits with
the visors up.”

She’s been in heavy scenes before, Jay thought.
Probably a lot more than I have. In the back of his
mind he remembered the only real danger he had ever
seen, the battle in orbit that his side had lost. Because
of me, Jay heard his mind accuse. We lost because of
me.

“They’re gaining on us,” Kelly announced, the
binocs glued to her eyes. “Can’t you go faster? ”

“This tub isn’t built for speed,” Jay grumbled,
leaning on the throttle. The bus lurched marginally
faster.

March/April 1988

“There’s no place to hide out here,” she said.

“It’s like the ocean.” He thought that his father
would know what to do. An old salt like him, with his
Annapolis training, would be right at home on this
lunar sea.

“You’ve only got the one airlock?”

Jay nodded. “Emergency hatch here by my side,”
he nudged the red release catch with his left elbow,
“but you’ve got to be in a suit to use it.”

“We’d better suit up, then. And fast.”

“Now wait a minute...”

She cut him off with a dagger-sharp look. “You
say you’re not in with them. Okay, I’ll believe that. As
long as you behave like you’re not in with them.”

Jay turned away from those blazing eyes and
looked out the side window. The red crawler was gain-
ing on them, coming up on their left rear.

Kelly said, “Suits.”

She’s scared of what they’ll do when they overtake
us, he thought. Deep inside him, Jay was frightened
too. He set the controls on autopilot and followed the
diminutive redhead back toward the airlock hatch.

It took nearly fifteen minutes to worm into the
suits and check out all the seals and systems.

“When we get outside,” Kelly said through her
open visor, “no radio. If we have to talk, we put our
helmets together.”

“Tete-a-tete.”

She flashed a quick grin at him, thinking it was a
pun rather than standard lunar jargon.

They clumped back to the cab, single file in the
bulky suits. The crawler had gained appreciably on
them. It was scarcely half a kilometer away. Jay
began pecking at the guidance computer’s keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Kelly demanded. “We
don’t have time...”

“Instructing this bucket to circle around and head
back to base. That way we can pick it up again later.
Don’t think we’re going to walk back to Moonbase, do
you?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” she admitted.

They made their way back to the airlock and
squeezed inside together. The outer hatch was on the
right side of the bus, away from the approaching
crawler. His stomach quivering with butterflies, Jay
snapped his visor down securely and punched the but-
ton that cycled the airlock. He had to override the
safety subsystem that prevented the lock from being
used while the bus was in motion.

It seemed like an hour. The pumps clattered loud
enough to be heard Earthside. Finally the amber light
turned to red and the outer hatch popped slightly ajar.
Jay swung it open the rest of the way.

The rough landscape was rushing past them at
nearly thirty klicks per hour. It looked very hard and
solid, totally uninviting.

“You sure you want to do this? ” he asked.

“It’s better than being killed.”

“Maybe.”

“You first,” she commanded.

Jay obeyed almost by reflex. He waited for a
patch of ground that was relatively free of rocks, then
jumped from the lip of the airlock. It wasn’t until he
was soaring through the vacuum in the dreamlike

slow motion of lunar gravity that he realized this
might all have been her ploy for getting the bus to
herself.

He landed on his feet, staggered sideways with the
acceleration from the bus, and fell to the ground. With
instincts honed by almost three years on the Moon, he
put out both arms, caught himself before he hit the
dusty soil, and pushed himself erect. A few staggering
steps and he was safely balanced on his feet.

He had kicked up some dust, but not as much as he
had feared. This area’s not as dusty as some, Jay
thought as he watched the powdery clouds slowly set-
tle around him.

Kelly jumped and tumbled when she landed,
skidding sideways down the slight slope of a worn an-
cient craterlet. Jay dashed after her as 301 trundled
off in the opposite direction, on its own, under
automatic control.

She was waving frantically at him. God, she’s
hurt, Jay thought. Or her suit’s ripped.

He slipped and slid down the almost-glassy slope
of the little crater and ended up on the seat of his
pants, by her side.

She was on her stomach, lying still. Backpack did
not seem damaged. No obvious leaks. He leaned his
helmet against hers.

“Are you okay?”

Kelly reached an arm around his neck and yanked
hard. “Get down, asshole!”

Jay flattened out, feeling his face flame with sud-
den anger.

“Want those bastards to see us?” she hissed.
“Why don’t you wave a friggin’ flag?”

Jay held onto his swooping temper. For a few
moments they lay side by side. Then Kelly wormed
her way to the lip of the crater. Jay followed.

Rising only far enough to see across the
pockmarked plain, they watched 301 dwindling toward
the horizon, with the red crawler still closing the
distance between them.

But then the crawler stopped. The pod hatch
opened and one of the pressure-suited figures climbed
out.

Jay turned his head toward Kelly. “Of all the
mother-loving dimwits, you gave yourself diarrhea
over nothing. They’re surveyors! Look, they’re taking
out their tools.”

“Oh yeah?”

The man had taken an arm’s-length rod from the
tool pack on the rear of the crawler. He hiked it up on-
to his shoulder, then turned and aimed it at the
retreating bulk of 301.

The rod flashed sudden flame. A blaze of light
streaked across the airless plain and hit 301. The bus
exploded. All in total silence.

Jay watched, stunned, as pieces of 301 soared
gently across the landscape. He recognized one frag-
ment as the driver’s chair, tumbling slowly end over
end and smashing apart when it finally hit the ground.

“Jesus,” Jay whispered.

“Some surveyors,” Kelly muttered.

How in the name of St. Michael the Archangel are
we going to get back to the base? Jay asked himself. If
we call for help those guys will hear us and come over

PAGE 43

March/April 1988

to finish the job.

Kelly was pecking at the radio controls on the left
wrist of her suit. Is she going to surrender to them?
Not likely, he knew.

She pointed to the frequency setting, then to the
side of her helmet, and finally put a finger up in front
of her visor. Jay understood her sign language.
They’re using this freak ; listen, don’t talk.

They lay side by side at the lip of the little crater,
watching and listening. The two terrorists drove their
crawler to the gutted wreck of 301 and started inspec-
ting the wreckage. They want to make sure of us, Jay
realized.

Leaning his helmet against Kelly’s, he whispered,
“Mavbe we can grab their crawler while they’re pok-
ing through the debris.”

Her voice was muffled, but he could feel the
reproach in it. “We wouldn’t get fifty meters before
they spotted us. They’re professionals, Jay. We’re
lucky they didn’t see you dancing around when you
jumped from the bus.”

His face went red again. And he realized that
whispering was stupid, too.

“Then what...”

“Shh! Lemme hear them.”

Jay could not understand the language coming
through his earphones, but apparently Kelly could.
She repeated it, like a translator :

“...they could have jumped before the rocket hit
them. ...But that means they knew who we were. ...It
makes no difference. ..I can’t figure that, must be
slang or a joke. ..they’re laughing — Ah! They’re say-
ing we can’t get very far on foot. If we call for help
they’ll home in on our transmission and finish us off. ’ ’
Jay nodded inside his helmet. That was the crux of
the matter.

“Why bother?” Kelly resumed translating. “The
oxygen plant will be blasted away in another twelve
hours. They’ll never get back in time to do anything
about it.”

Kelly pounded her gloved fist on the glass-smooth
rim of rock . “The oxygen factory ! That’s it ! ”

She slid down slightly and turned on her side. Jay
stayed up at the rim, watching and thinking.

We could send a warning to Moonbase, put them
on alert. But then those killers would find us. And that
would be that.

So what? he asked himself. You’re finished any-
way. They’re never going to leave you in peace. She
told you that. The only way out is death.

He looked out across the desolate expanse of rock.
The two terrorists were making their way back to the
crawler now, their foreign words sounding musical
yet guttural in his earphones, almost like a Wagnerian
opera.

It’d be easy enough to open your visor, wise guy,
Jay told himself. Just crack the seal and take a nice
deep breath of vacuum. Poof! Your troubles are all
finished. You wouldn’t be the first guy to do it that
way.

His gloved hands did not move. I don’t want to die,
Jay realized. No matter what happens, I sure as hell
don’t want to die.

Suddenly his earphones shrieked with a wild
PAGE 44

whining, screeching wail. He clamped his hands
uselessly against his helmet, then stabbed at the radio
control on his wrist and shut off the skull-splitting
noise.

He slid down beside Kelly. She was staring at her
wrist controls.

“Jammer,” Jay said.

“They’re taking no chances,” she agreed.
“They’re going to leave us out here and jam any radio
transmission we might send. ’ ’

“That means they’ll be staying with their
crawler,” he said. “The jammer’s only got a limited
range — far as the horizon.”

“We can walk away from it.”

“If they don’t see us.”

“How long would it take to get back to Moon-
base?”

“Too long,” Jay answered. “Unless...”

“Unless what?”

“Follow me and do what I do. Stay low as possible
until we’re out of their sight.”

They crawled on their hands and knees, slowly,
carefully across the small crater and over its farther
rim. The powdery top layer of the regolith turned to
dust wherever they touched it. Before long the dust
was clinging to their suits. Jay could feel it grating in
one of his knee joints. That could be dangerous.
Worse, it covered the visors, obscuring vision.

Not that there was much to see. Jay watched his
gloved hands tracking along the barren regolith. It
reminded him of videos about evolution he had seen as
a schoolchild: the emergence of life from the sea onto

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March/April 1988

dry land. Never find land drier than this, he knew.

At last he stopped, sat upright, and took a wiper
pad from the pouch on his leg. The dust clung stub-
bornly to his visor, electrostatically charged by the
invisible inflow of solar wind particles.

He helped Kelly clear her visor. Cautiously, he
rose to his feet. The damned crawler could still be
seen, which meant the men in it still had a chance of
spotting them.

Back to crawling, like an infant, like a lizard, like
a slimy amphibian just learning to walk. We must
make a weird sight, Jay thought. He stopped again
and looked back. Only the rooftop of the crawler was
in sight. He flicked his suit radio on for the briefest in-
stant; the shriek of the jammer still burned his ears.

Motioning for Kelly to stand, he leaned close to
her and said, “They’ve got a tall antenna. We’re still
being jammed, but at least we can walk now.”

They cleaned their visors again, then headed off
almost due east.

After several minutes Kelly tapped Jay’s
shoulder. He leaned down to touch helmets.

“Isn’t Moonbase in that direction?” She pointed
roughly southwestward.

Jay snorted at her. “Don’t try to navigate by the
stars. The Moon’s north pole doesn’t point toward
Polaris.”

“Yeah, but...”

“I’m following 301’s tracks,” he pointed to the
churned soil. “If we can make it back to the main beat
between Moonbase and Copernicus we’ll come across
an emergency shelter sooner or later. Then we...”

He jerked with surprise, then swiftly pulled Kelly
down flat onto the ground.

Wordlessly he pointed at the crawler that was
slowly making its way toward them. From the direc-
tion opposite the crawler they had just left. This one
was painted bright orange. It too had a life-support
module atop it, and a tall whip mast, visible only
because of the tiny red light winking at its end.

They sent a team to follow us, Jay realized. They
boxed us in: one team from Fra Mauro, the other
behind us from Moonbase.

He half-dragged Kelly away from the track of 301,
angling toward the Copernicus-Moonbase “road” and
away from the oncoming crawler. They might not be
part of the terrorist gang, Jay thought. Might be a
coincidence that they’re here. They might even be
Moonbase security searching for us. Sure. Might be
Santa Claus, too.

For hours they walked, seemingly lost. Not the
slightest sign of civilization. Not even a bit of litter. No
trace of life. Nothing but rocks and craters and the
sudden horizon with the utterly black sky beyond it.
And the dust that clung to them, rasped against their
suits, blurred their visors.

Suits are good for forty-eight hours, Jay kept tell-
ing himself. Oxygen, heat, water enough for forty-
eight hours. Radiation protection. They’ll even stop a
micrometeor without springing a leak. Says so in the
instruction manual.

But he wondered.

Time and again they tried their suit radios. Still
the wailing scream of the jamming defeated them.

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March/April 1988

PAGE 45

“They must have planted jammers along the
whole route,” Jay told Kelly.

“That means we’ll have to get back to Moonbase
itself in...” she peered at the watch on her suit wrist,
“...six hours.”

No way, he knew. Not afoot. But they kept walk-
ing. There was nothing else to do. For hours.

Kelly fished a wire from one of her suit pouches
and they connected their helmet intercoms, like two
kids talking through papercups and a soaped string.

“It’s got a lonely kind of beauty to it,” she said. “I
never thought of the Moon as beautiful before.”

Jay nodded inside his helmet. “I wouldn’t call it
beautiful. Awesome, yes. It’s got grandeur, all right.
Like the desert in Arizona.”

“Or the tundra up above the Arctic Circle.”

“It’ll take a long time before people screw up this
place. But they’ll do it. They’re already starting the
job, aren’t they?”

Kelly was silent for a while, then she asked,
“Why’d you put in with the rebels? Against the
Peacekeepers?”

He expected the old anger seething in his gut. In-
stead he heard himself answering almost calmly, “I
fell for their line. Said the U.S. couldn’t trust its
defense to a bunch of foreigners. Said Washington had
sold us out to the Third World and the Commies. ’ ’

“I was with the Peacekeepers.”

“You were? Then?”

“Before. About three years before.”

“So you believe in them.”

“They’ve kept the peace. The nations are disarm-
ing. Or they were, before they realized Shamar had
made off with his own little arsenal.”

“And how do you feel about a hundred little na-
tions bossing the U.S. around?”

“I’m a Canadian,” Kelly replied.

“Oh.”

They lapsed into silence. Then Kelly spoke up
again, “You’re lucky you didn’t have to go to jail.
Most of the other conspirators got long sentences.”
“Sure, I’m lucky all right.”

“Your father must have been a big help. He’s
running the IPF now, you know.”

The old anger was strangely muted, but Jay could
still feel the resentment smoldering inside him. Or
was it shame?

“Big help,” he mocked. “Instead of jail he got me
banished to the Moon. I can’t set foot back on Earth
for another seven years, not unless you get me ar-
rested and bring me back in handcuffs.”

“It’s better than being in jail, though, isn’t it?”

Jay hesitated. “Yeah, I guess so,” he had to ad-
mit.

“Your father must’ve twisted a lot of arms to get
you off the hook. Most of ’em got life.”

Jay opened his mouth to answer, but he had no
reply. He had never considered the proposition before.
Dad pleaded with the court to lighten my sentence? He
found that difficult to believe. Especially after he had
rejected the old man’s offers of help. It did not square
with all he knew about the stern, uncompromising
man who had left his mother so many years ago. Very
difficult to believe.

But not impossible.

Jay was still pondering this new thought when he
stopped and stared at a tiny red light blinking against
the dark sky, just over the horizon. He reached for
another cleaning pad and wiped his visor. The light
did not move or waver.

“Hey, look ! ” he yelled .

He pointed, then gestured for Kelly to follow him.
An emergency shelter. Fresh oxygen and water. His
suit was starting to smell bad, Jay realized. He hadn’t
admitted it to himself until now.

And maybe a radio with enough power to burn
through the jamming. Less than three hours left.
Won’t do us much good to get to the shelter if Moon-
base itself gets wiped. Just prolong the agony.

The shelter was a life-support module from the
earliest days of lunar exploration, buried under sev-
eral meters of scooped-up regolith rubble. Safe as a
squirrel’s nest in winter.

The left leg of Jay’s suit was grating ominously as
they hurried the last kilometer toward the shelter. The
dust was grinding away at that knee joint. He looked
over at Kelly. She seemed to be keeping pace with
him, despite her shorter legs.

They made their way down the slight slope to the
shelter’s airlock entrance. It was too small for both of
them to go through at the same time, but they squeez-
ed into it together anyway. Jay heard somebody
laughing as the airlock cycled; it was his own voice,
cackling like a madman.

“We made it, kid,” he said. “We’re safe.”

“For the time being,” she reminded him, as the
inner hatch slid open.

The shelter was old and small; its inner walls
curved up barely high enough to allow Jay to stand
upright. The equipment inside looked ancient, dusty.
Even the bunks seemed moldy with age.

“They’ve already been here.” Jay saw that the
life support console was smashed, as if someone had
taken a sledgehammer to it. They dared not remove
their suits.

Kelly asked, ‘ ‘The radio. . . ? ”

Also hopelessly battered, useless.

“Just about two hours now,” Kelly said. “How
long will it take us to get back to Moonbase? ’ ’

“Depends,” he replied, “on whether this shelter
has a hopper in working condition.”

Jay led the way back through the airlock and out
behind the pile of rubble covering the shelter.

The spidery body of a lunar hopper stood out in the
open. It looked like a small metal platform raised off
the ground by three skinny bowed legs. An equally in-
substantial railing went around three sides of the
platform, with a pedestal for controls and displays.
Beneath the platform were small spherical tanks and
a rocket nozzle mounted on a swivel.

He inspected the hopper swiftly. “Cute. They shot
up the oxygen tank. No oxygen, no rocket. Lazy
bastards, though. They should have dismantled this
go-cart more thoroughly than this.”

Explaining as he worked, Jay ducked back inside
the shelter and came out with a pair of oxygen bottles
from the shelter’s emergency supply and a set of tools.
It took more than an hour, but finally he got the long

March/April 1988

PAGE 48

green bottles attached firmly enough to the line that
fed the rocket’s combustion chamber.

At least I think it’s firmly enough, he told himself.

He helped Kelly up onto the platform and then got
up beside her, snapped on the safety tethers that hung
from the railing, and plugged his suit radio into the
hopper’s radio system. Kelly followed his every mo-
tion.

“Ready to try it?” he asked.

“Yeah. Sure.” Her voice in his earphones sounded
doubtful.

He nudged the throttle. For an eternally long
moment not a thing happened. Then the platform
shuddered and jumped and they were soaring up over
the lunar landscape like a howitzer shell.

“It works!” Kelly exulted. Jay noticed that both
her gloved fists were gripping the railing hard enough
to bend the metal.

“Next stop, Moonbase!” he yelled back at her.

They got high enough to see the lights of the base’s
solar energy farm, spread out across the shore of the
Mare Nubium, where automated tractors were con-
verting raw regolith soil into solar cells and laying
them out in neat hexagonal patterns.

Jay tried to steer toward the lights, but the hop-
per’s internal safety program decided that there was
not enough fuel for maneuvering and a safe landing.
So they glided on, watching the lights of the energy
farm slide off to their right.

It was eerie, flying in total silence, without a
breeze, without even vibration from the platform they
stood upon. Like a dream, coasting effortlessly high
above the ground.

Kelly used the hopper’s radio to send an
emergency call to Moonbase security. “There’s a nu-
clear bomb planted somewhere in the oxygen fac-
tory,” she repeated a dozen times. There was no an-
swer from Moonbase.

“Either we’re not getting through to them or
they’re not getting through to us,” she said, her voice
brittle with apprehension.

“Maybe they think it’s a nut call.”

He sensed her shaking her head. “They’ve got to
check it out. They can’t let a warning about a nuclear
bomb go without checking on it.”

“Nukes are pretty small. The oxygen plant’s
damned big.”

“I know,” she answered. “I know. And there isn’t
much time.”

Jay realized that they were flying toward the
imminent nuclear explosion. Like charging into the
mouth of the cannon, he thought.

A long silence, and then they began descending.
The ground was slowly, languidly coming closer. And
closer.

“Will one nuke really be enough to wipe out the
whole base?” Kelly asked.

“Depends on its size. Probably won’t vaporize the
whole base. But they’re smart to put it in the oxygen
factory. Like a shooting a guy in the heart. The blast
will destroy Moonbase’s oxygen production. No oh-two
for life support, or for export. Oxygen’s still the
Moon’s major export product.”

“I know that.”

“The bomb will kick up a helluva lot of debris, too.
Like a big meteor impacting. The splash will cover the
solar energy farms, I’ll bet. Electricity production
goes down close to zero.”

Kelly muttered something unintelligible.

Jay had to admire the terrorists’ planning. “They
won’t kill many people directly. They’ll force Moon-
base to shut down. Somebody’ll have to evacuate a
couple thousand people back to Earth. Neat job.”

The ground was coming up faster now.
Automatically the hopper’s computer fired its little
rocket engine and they slowed, then landed with hard-
ly a thump.

“We must be a couple of klicks from the factory,”
Jay said. “You stay here and keep transmitting a
warning. I’ll go to the factory and see what’s happen-
ing there.”

“Hell no!” Kelly snapped. “We’re both going to
the factory.”

“That’s stupid...”

“Don’t get macho on me, Yank, just when I was
starting to like you. Besides, you might still be one of
the bad guys. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

He grinned at her, knowing that she could not see
it through the helmet visor. “You still harbor suspi-
cions about me?”

“Officially, yes.”

“And unofficially?” he asked.

“We’re wasting time. Let’s get moving.”

There was less than a half-hour remaining by the
time they reached the oxygen factory.

“It’s big!” Kelly said. Their suit radios worked
now ; they had outrun the jammers .

“There’s a thousand places they could tuck a nuke
in here.”

“Where the hell are the Moonbase security peo-
ple?”

Jay took a deep breath. Where would I place a
nuke, to do the maximum damage? Not out here at the
periphery of the factory. Deep inside, where the heavy
machinery is. The rock crushers? No. The ovens and
electric arc separators.

“Come on,” he commanded.

They ducked under conveyor belts, dodged main-
tenance robots gliding smoothly along the factory’s
concrete pad with arms extended semi-menacingly at
the intruding humans. Past the rock crushers, poun-
ding so thunderously that Jay could feel their raw
power vibrating along his bones. Past the shaker
screens where the crushed rock and sandy soil were
sifted.

Up ahead was the heavy stuff, the steel complex of
electrical ovens and the shining domes protecting the
lightning-bolt arcs that extracted pure oxygen from
the lunar minerals. The area was a maze of pipes. Off
at one end of it stood the tall cryogenic tanks where
the precious oxygen was stored.

It was dark in there. The meteor screen overhead
shut out the Earthlight, and there were only a few
lamps scattered here and there. The maintenance
robots did not need lights and humans were
discouraged from tinkering with the automated ma-
chinery.

“It’s got to be somewhere around here,” Jay told

PAGE 49

March /April 1988

Kelly.

They separated, each hunting frantically for an
object that was out of place, a foreign invading cell in
this almost-living network of machinery that pulsed
like a heart and produced oxygen for its human
dependents to breathe.

*** *** ***

Jay watched the six pressure-suited figures, his
mind racing. Less than three minutes left! What the
hell can we do? Where’s the base security people?

For a wild instant he thought that these six might
be Moonbase security personnel. But their suits bore
no insignia, no Moonbase logo, no names stencilled on
their chests.

Feeling trapped and desperately close to death,
Jay suddenly yelled into his helmet microphone,
“That’s it ! It’sdisarmed. We can relax now.”

Kelly scuttled over to him and pressed her helmet
against his. “What are you...”

He shoved her away and pointed with his other
hand. The intruders were gabbling at each other in
their own language. Two of them ducked under a con-
veyor belt and headed straight toward the tall
cryogenic storage tanks.

“Come on,” Jay whispered urgently at Kelly.

They duck-walked on a path parallel to the two
terrorists, staying behind the conveyors and thick
pipes, detouring around the massive stainless-steel
domes of the electric arcs until they came up slightly
behind the pair, at the base of the storage tanks.

Jay jabbed a gloved finger, gesturing. Beneath
the first of the tanks lay an oblong case, completely
without markings of any kind.

One of the terrorists bent over it and popped open
a square panel. The other leaned over his shoulder,
watching.

“I should have brought a gun,” Kelly muttered.

“Good time to think of it.”

Without straightening up, he launched himself
across the ten meters separating them from the ter-
rorists. Arms outstretched, he slammed into the two
of them and they all smashed against the curving wall
of the storage tanks.

Jay had seen men in pressure suits fight each
other. Tempers can flare beyond control even in vac-
uum. Most of the time they were like the short-lived
shoving matches between football players encased in
their protective padding and helmets. But now and
then lunar workers had tried to murder one another.

He knew exactly what to do. Before either of the
terrorists could react Jay had twisted the helmet
release catch of the nearer one. He panicked and
thrashed madly, kicking and fumbling with his gloved
hands to seal the helmet again. He must have been
screaming, too, but Jay could not hear him.

The second one had time to stagger to his knees,
halfway facing Jay. But Kelly slammed into his side,
knocking him over against the oblong crate that held
the nuclear weapon.

Jay scooped up one of the fallen flechette guns and
fired a trio of darts into the man’s chest. The suit lost
its stiffness as the air blew out of it, spewing blood
through the holes. He turned to see the other terrorist
fleeing madly away, legs flailing as he bounced and

PAGE 50

sailed in the low gravity, hands still fumbling with his
helmet seal.

“One minute to go! ” Kelly shouted.

Jay pushed the dead body away and grabbed at
the nuke.

“It’s too heavy for...”

“Not on the Moon,” he grunted as he jerked the
two-meter-long case off the concrete floor and hefted
it to his shoulder.

“This way,” he said. “Take their guns. Cover
me.”

They ran, straight up now, five meters at a stride,
no hiding. Back the way they had come, toward the
rock crushers. If this thing’s salvage-fused we’re
finished, Jay told himself. But the first thing they do
when they decommission a weapon is remove the fus-
ing. I hope.

A pressure-suited figure flashed in front of him,
then spun and went down, grabbing at its chest. Out of
the side of his visor Jay saw two more figures racing
to catch up with him. One of them tried to jump over
some pipes. Unaccustomed to the lunar gravity, he
leaped too hard and smashed into an overhead con-
veyor belt.

Jay didn’t need a watch — his pulse was thunder-
ing in his ears, pounding off the seconds. He saw the
rock-crushing machines up ahead, felt a sting in one
leg, then another in his side.

His suit radio wasn’t working. Or maybe he had
shut it off back there somewhere, he didn’t remember.
His vision was blurring, everything was going
shadowy. All he could see was the big conveyor belt
trundling lunar rocks up to the pounding jaws of the
crusher.

Lunar gravity or not, the package on his shoulder
weighed a ton. He staggered, he tottered, he reached
the conveyor belt at last and with the final microgram
of his strength he heaved the bulky package of death
onto the rock-strewn belt and watched the crusher’s
ferocious steel teeth, corroded with dirt and stained by
chemicals, crunch hungrily into the obscene oblong
package of death.

Jay never knew if the bomb went off. His world

turned totally dark and oblivious.

*** *** ***

The first face he saw when he opened his eyes
again was his father’s.

J.W. Hazard was sitting by the hospital bed, gaz-
ing intently at his son. For the first time Jay could
remember, his father’s grim, weathered face looked
softened, concerned. Instead of the hard-bitten, driv-
ing man Jay had known, Hazard seemed at a loss,
almost bewildered, as he stared down at his son. His
eyes seemed misted over. Even his iron-gray hair
seemed slightly disheveled, as if he had been running
his hands through it.

“You’re going to be okay, Jay-Jay,” he
whispered. “You’re going to pull through all right.”

Jay’s mouth felt as if it were stuffed with cotton.
He tried to swallow.

“Wh...” He choked slightly, coughed. “What are
you doing here, Dad?”

“I came up when they told me what you’d done.”

“What did I do?”

March/April 1988

“You saved Moonbase, son. They damn near kill-
ed you, but you kept the nuke from going off.” There
was pride in the older man’s voice.

“The girl... Kelly?”

His father smiled slightly. “She’s outside. Want to
see her?”

“Sure.”

Hazard got to his feet carefully, not entirely cer-
tain of himself in the low gravity. We’re still on the
Moon, Jay realized. His father was in full uniform:
sky-blue tunic and trousers with gold piping and the
diamond insignia that identified him as a marshal of
the International Peacekeeping Force.

Kelly came buzzing into the room on an electric
wheelchair, one leg wrapped in a plastic bandage.

“You’re hurt,” Jay blurted, feeling woolly-head-
ed, stupid.

“They didn’t give up after you tossed the nuke into
the crusher,” she explained cheerfully. “We had a bit
of a fire fight.”

“This young lady,” Hazard said, his gravely voice
resuming some of its normal bellow, “not only held off
four fanatics, but managed to patch your suit at the
same time, thereby saving your life.”

Jay muttered, “Thanks. A lot.”

Clasping his hands behind his back and standing
spraddle-legged in the middle of the hospital room.
Hazard took over the conversation. “The terrorists
had launched an attack on the Moonbase security of-
fice itself, designed to keep the base security forces
tied up while they planted the nuke and waited for it to
gooff.”

“That’s why we got no response from base securi-
ty,” Kelly interjected.

“This really was a Peacekeepers’ operation,” Jay
said to her.

“No way! We just called your father when you
went into surgery.”

“How long have I been out?”

“Three days.”

Turning to his father, Jay said, “You must’ve
taken a high-energy express to get here so quick. ’ ’
Hazard’s face reddened slightly. “Well,” he
blustered, “you’re the only son I’ve got, after all.”
“You really care that much about me?”

“I’ve always cared about you,” the older man
said.

Kelly was grinning at the two of them.

Abruptly, Hazard turned for the door. “I’ve got to
contact Geneva. Got to get some forensics people up
here to look at the remains of that nuke. Maybe we can
get some info on where it’s been hidden all this time.
Might help us find the others that’re missing. I’ll be
back later.”

“Okay, Dad. Thanks.”

“Thanks?” Hazard shot him a puzzled look.

“For everything.”

The old man made a sour face and pushed through
the door.

“You’re embarrassing him.” Kelly laughed and
wheeled her chair close to the bed.

“You saved my life,” Jay said.

“Not me. You were clinically dead when the
medics reached us. They pulled you back.”

He licked his dry lips, then, “You know, for a
while there, I wasn’t certain that I wanted to go on liv-
ing. But you made me decide. I really owe you a lot for
that.”

Kelly beamed at him. “Welcome back to life, Jay.
Welcome back to the human race.”

— ABO —

Bookshelf

( Continued from page 23)

can change his shape to look like
anyone or anything.

Starpirate’s Brain is old-
fashioned, turn-your-brain-off
action/adventure. Starpirate
downloaded his brain into a com-
puter chip for transfer to a new
body, but the chip, which contains
all kinds of priceless information,
has been stolen. Jolson must find
the brain and solve a murder, for
which he’s the prime suspect. All
the women he encounters are
beautiful, of course.

Jolson does some pretty
stupid things for someone who
was a spy in the Chameleon Corps
for 20 years, like continually in-
sisting on entering situations
alone when every time he does he
ends up unconscious. The book is
often funny, but some jokes are

belabored too much. Unfortu-
nately, the solution to the murder
mystery is a cheat, because
there’s no evidence of the killer’s
motive until we find out whodunit.

The book’s set in a far future
universe, but it’s not very
futuristic — though the book
centers around a science fictional
device, as a whole this world is
just like the present, only with
spaceships and zapguns. It’s not
as good as Goulart’s old
Chameleon Corps stories, but if
you like his other work, you’ll en-
joy it.

Rating: ☆☆M>

Buck Godot: PSmlth
By Phil Foglio
Donning/Starblaze, 1988
80 pp., $7.95

There’s not much you can say
about a humorous graphic novel;
either it’s funny, or it isn’t. The

March/April 1988

second volume in the adventures
of Buck Godot, the hard-drinking
hired (zap) gun who is “always
available but never free,” is even
funnier than the first one. In ad-
dition to the humor of the main
story, Foglio sprinkles his books
with outrageous sight gags. This
one is highly recommended to
anyone with a sense of humor.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆

— ABO —

Until thf.rk is

NO LONELINESS,
NO DESTITUTION,
NO SICKNESS,

NO WAR... EB]

Please join.

American
Red CroHH

PAGE 51

If you like good old-fashioned
space adventure, you’ll really enjoy
the novelette in this issue from BEN
BOVA titled “Impact.”

Bova is as well known for his
editing as his writing, and he’s as
noted for his efforts to communicate
science to the masses as he is for his
work in the science fiction field.

In fact, his unique and varied ca-
reer would be so difficult to sum-
marize in the space I have, I’ll have to
be content to mention a few
highlights.

He has written more than 70
novels and non-fiction books, in-

Ben Bova

eluding Privateers, Millennium,
Voyagers, and one of my favorites.
Colony.

He has been editor of Analog
magazine and editorial director of
Omni magazine and has won the Hugo
Award for best professional editor six
times.

His involvement in the fields of
science and technology includes ap-
pearances on hundreds of radio and
television broadcasts such as “Good
Morning America” and the “Today”
show, and popular lectures on topics
ranging from the U.S. space program
to writing.

His latest non-fiction book, Wel-
come to Moonbase (Ballantine),
which deals with space technology,
and his last novel. The Kinsman Saga
(Tor), both came out last fall.

Bova used some of the technology
he talks about in Welcome to Moon-

PAGE52

ABORIGINES
By Laurel Lucas

Creative Dive rsity

Bob Eggleton

base in a novel he is working on called
Peacekeepers. “Impact” was ex-
cerpted from Peacekeepers , which is
due out from Tor in October of this
year.

Artist BOB EGGLETON il-
lustrated “Impact,” and his work is
on our cover for the fourth time.

Eggleton was at the Boskone
convention in Springfield, Massa-
chusetts, recently, where he won the
Jack Gaughan Memorial Award for
best emerging artist, and a first
place, chairman’s choice, in the art
show.

He’s busy as ever with cover art
for mystery and horror books for Tor,
and added to that a science fiction
series for young adults being publish-
ed by Cloverdale Press.

Seems a lot of people have known
about this talented artist’s
“emergence” for some time now, us
included.

One elderly woman’s need to
combat the fear of violence leads her
to drastic measures in “Sunshine
Delight,” by PAUL EDWARDS.

Edwards is a person with many
identities, not the least of which is
Paul E. Clinco, M.D., an Arizona
physician and father of two.

But sometimes he is called Sir
Gareth of Bloodwine Gorge, a thir-
teenth-century knight, or Bugi, son of

March/April 1988

Wugi, a visionary Frankish peasant.
Those are two of his identities in the
Society for Creative Anachronism, a
pastime this ex-theater major has
wholeheartedly embraced.

Then there is his musical identity.
When he’s playing a gig, he’s Pro-
fessor Paul, the blues and boogie
piano player.

Edwards sold his first story,
“Three Knives in Ithkar,” to Andre
Norton for Magic in Ithkar, Vol. Ill,
two years ago.

Recently he won first place in the
Writers of the Future contest with the
story “Heroic Measures.”

Now he’s at work on his first
novel.

“Sunshine Delight” is illustrated
by LESLIE PARDEW, a Utah artist
with a background in commercial art
and animation.

Pardew is currently doing a lot of
computer art for a company that
publishes computer games. He is also
working on some products for the
Spacey Love Corporation, a children’s
educational group, and putting

Paul Edwards

together a magazine with some col-
leagues.

This is his fourth appearance in
ABO. His work was also the cover art
for issue No. 6.

Elaine Radford

“To Be An Auk” is ELAINE
RADFORD’S tale about resurrecting
an extinct species and teaching it how
to be birdlike all over again.

Radford has a lot of experience
with birds. Her latest book for TFH
publishers is called A Step-byStep
Book About Finches.

She owns an extensive aviary and
runs a stock photo file of birds, rep-
tiles and fish with colleague Roger
Williams.

Radford’s first SF story, “The
Ramsey Gryphon,” appeared in
Amazing in May of 1984.

Radford makes her third appear-
ance in ABO, after bringing us “Pass-
ing” in issue No. 4 and “Letting Go”
in issue No. 8.

Not surprisingly, Radford says
she likes her bird-oriented stories the
best

The illustrator for “To Be An
Auk” is DAVID R. DEITRICK, an
Alaska resident who recently ven-
tured south for Boskone.

He liked his work for this piece so
much, he put it on exhibit at the con-
vention.

Deitrick illustrated “Muttmind”
in our last issue. He says right now
he’s working on some advertising for
Arco, “boring stuff, but it pays really

David R. Deitrick

good.”

When I asked him about the latest
news of his Alaskan lifestyle, he told
me he’s been having to chase a moose
away from the doghouse lately.

It seems the moose is attracted to
the hay that Deitrick put in the dog-
house for his dog and her four
samoyed-beagle-malamut puppies.
(Anyone looking for a sled dog? )

PAUL A. GILSTER manages to
impart a genuinely creepy feeling to
his story of isolation in Iceland,
“When the Stranger Comes.”

Gilster has visited the land of ice
and summit meetings more than
once. He says he is interested in the
culture, and the setting came in handy
when he needed a remote locale for
his story.

The North Carolina resident has a
full schedule of free-lance projects,
and estimates he has written about
100 features, reviews and essays in
the past 18 months.

His first short story sale was
“Merchant Dying” in ABO No. 5, and
he’s now at work on three more short
stories.

“When the Stranger Comes” is il-
lustrated by LARRY BLAMIRE. I’m
beginning to lose count of how much
work Larry has done for ABO, but
check out “It Came from the
Slushpile” in issue No. 5 and “True
Magic” in issue No. 7 for some prime
examples.

A Long Time Ago ...

Before taking charge at Aboriginal Science
Fiction, our editor, Charles C. Ryan, was the editor
of Galileo, a science fiction magazine published in
the mid-1970s. During his tenure there, he helped
discover a number of new writers who have since
gone on to win Nebula and/or Hugo awards, writers
such as Connie Willis, John Kessel, Lewis Shiner
and more.

Now, on his behalf, we’d like to give you an op-
portunity to see some of the best stories he collected
a decade ago.

Starry Messenger: The Best of Galileo (St.
Martin’s Press, 1979) features 12 stories by the fol-
lowing authors: Harlan Ellison, Brian Aldiss, Alan
Dean Foster, Connie Willis, John Kessel, Kevin
O’Donnell Jr., D.C. Poyer, M. Lucie Chin, Joe L.
Hensley & Gene DeWeese, John A. Taylor, Gregor
Hartmann, and Eugene Potter.

For a limited time, while copies last, you can
purchase a first-edition hardcover copy of Starry
Messenger: The Best of Galileo for $10, plus $1
postage and handling. If you would like your copy
autographed by the editor, please indicate how you
would like the note to read.

To order, send $11 for each copy to: Aboriginal
Science Fiction, Book Dept., P.O. Box 2449, Wob-
urn, MA 01888.

PAGE 53

March/April 1988

along with Bob Eggleton, helped to il-
lustrate, was scheduled to open at the
Hartford Planetarium in February of
this year.

Elissa Malcolm
ELISSA MALCOHN is the
author of the poem “All Creatures
Great and Small.”

Malcohn, a staff assistant at
Harvard University Business School,
says she is known as Keyboard
Jockey of the Phosphor Screen at
work.

Otherwise, she is known as the
editor of Star Line: Newsletter of the
Science Fiction Poetry Association .

Talk about being a born writer:
Malcohn says she started keeping a
journal at age 6 and won her first
award for fiction at age 13. Her first

Jerry Workman

professional sale was the story
“Lazuli” to Isaac Asimov's four years
ago.

Her forthcoming projects include
the story “Another Place” in Amaz-
ing, and “Some Kind of Darwinism,”
a poetry collection from Ocean View
Books.

Malcohn lists some unusual travel
destinations. She’s been to the
Galapagos Islands and to Siberia
(voluntarily).

JERRY WORKMAN, cartoonist,
makes his living as an art director in
Ohio.

He made his first cartoon sale to
Starwind magazine in November of
1987, and has also sold cartoons to

A woman scientist plays mathe-
matical games with the universe in
“Birthplace,” by CHRIS BOYCE.

It’s Boyce’s first short story in
more than a decade. He made his first
sale in 1965.

Since he recently conditioned
himself to rise at 5 a.m. to write, he
has been working on a high-tech
thriller.

Paul A. Gilster

something with a smaller cast, which
it will then showcase. Blamire says
writing a small, intimate play will be
change for him. “I’m going to take a
whack at it,” he says.

Chris Boyce
PAGE 54

Bonita Kale
See Editor’s Notes
Page 19

doing paintings for conventions. She is
working on some detailed pieces for
Nolacon in New Orleans in September
and enjoyed the more serious-minded
tone of Boskone this year.

A planetarium show that she,

March/April 1988

Blamire is working on a book of
“single-panel, bizarre, surrealistic”
cartoons. In his other career, as an
actor/playwright, he has good
news/bad news.

The bad news is that his play
“Whyo” won’t be put on by the
Gloucester Stage Company this fall
after all, because of size limitations.

The good news is that the com-
pany has commissioned him to write

Larry Blamire

Pat Morrissey

Boyce lives in Glasgow, Scotland,
with his wife and kids, where he
makes his career in news research
and evidently likes his privacy.

On our ABO questionnaire he lists
“questionnaires” as one of his pet
peeves and “tranquility” as a pet
love.

We get the message.

“Birthplace” is illustrated by
PAT MORRISSEY, whose other work
for ABO includes illustrating “Scout’s
Honor” in issue No. 7 and “The
Darkfishers” in issue No. 5.

Morrissey spends a lot of her time

aviation magazines, including
Private Pilot, Aero and Kitplane.

Aviation, in particular World War
II airplanes, is one of his main hob-
bies. Comic strips is the other.

He says he admires the work of
Berke Breathed (“Bloom County”)
and Gary Larson (“The Far Side”),
and always wanted to be a cartoonist,
till one day he gave it a try.

He is now working on some car-
toons that deal with animal rights.

*** %** **%

The headline in USA Today was
“Prepare for a TV meltdown.”

The article mentioned the fact
that CBS will start filming the TV
movie “Chernobyl,” based on the ac-
claimed new book of the same name
by Frederik Pohl. Shooting reportedly
starts in May in, would you believe it,
the Soviet Union.

Lawrence Schiller, the man who
produced the lavish “Peter the
Great” miniseries for NBC, is in
charge of this joint U.S. /Soviet pro-
duction.

Pohl has twice contributed to
ABO: in issue No. 4 with “Search and
Destroy” and, in issue No. 6, he wrote

Classifieds

(Classified ads are $12 per column
inch or 40« per word. A classified
column is 2 Vs inches wide. Payment
must accompany all classified
orders. There is a 5% discount for
running the same ad 6 times; a 10%
discount for running the same ad 12
times.)

FREE SAMPLE Fantasy Mongers
Quarterly, catalog (includes new
Brian Lumley books: Hero of
Dreams, Compleat Crow, etc.) 22-
cent stamp: Ganley, Box 149, Buf-
falo, NY 14226. 1-9

I’VE BEEN SELLING reasonably
riced science fiction, fantasy and
orror paperbacks, hardcovers and
magazines since 1967. Free cata-
logs! Pandora’s Books Ltd., Box
ABO-54, Neche, ND 58265. 1-9

SCIENCE FICTION, FANTASY
books and magazines (new and us-
ed). Send $1.00 for 64-page catalog.
Collections purchased, large or
small. Robert A. Madle, 4406 Bestor
Drive, Rockville, MD, 20853.

1-11

VOLUNTEERS SOUGHT for
Aboriginal SF. Our magazine is
growing and we need some part-
time help. Volunteers must have
their own transportation and live
within commuting distance and be
hard workers. A minimum com-
mitment of 10 hours a week is re-
quired. There is a modest hourly
payment for some of the office jobs.
To apply, send a resume to:
Aboriginal SF, Volunteer Dept.,
P.O. Box 2449, Woburn, MA 01888.

the essay “Chernobyl and
Challenger: That Was the Year That
Was.”

I spoke to Pohl recently, and he
tells me that scriptwriter J.P. Miller
was in the Ukraine in September do-
ing his own research for the movie.
The movie organizers have been in-
terviewing Russian actors that they
might want to cast, to give them time
to learn English.

Pohl was in the Soviet Union
about six weeks after the nuclear
plant accident, and was surprised at
the open discussion and criticism ex-
pressed at a convention of Soviet
writers.

“They were saying all sorts of
things in public. At one point

(Mikhail) Gorbachev came in, sat
down, and listened.”

Pohl said Soviet television and
print has done some “pretty signifi-
cant investigative journalism” about
the accident, and he said his book has
gotten “a very good reaction” there.
There is even talk of translating it into
Russian.

Pohl says he is officially a consul-
tant to the movie production, but adds
he won’t be on location much. He’ll be
spending four months in the U.K. with
wife Elizabeth Anne Hull, who is
teaching there for a semester. Hull is
also an ABO contributor and gave us
“Second Best Friend” in ABO No. 2.

— ABO —

All Creatures Great and Small

By ElissaMalcohn

You ha ve a little one at home — I mean
a stag beetle, nothing compared to his Amazon
cousin, or you. No, he ’s a good fi ve centimeters
long and lumbering, rocking like a semi in high winds
across pebbles and red brick buckled up
to the heat. He seemed to me ugly at first,
then bea utiful, simply beca use he was large.

In a world of ants and flies

and gentrified delicacy, he was unique —

intimidating and yet, quite vulnerable.

Your shell could be my roof, a
blacktop highway. To you I am soft pulp,
gangly, with a head not worth severing
at first bite. My eyes are blind to all
but the simplest wavelengths; I can grasp
only wha t my hands can hold. And my hair
is limp as sea weed, wi thout its sa ving
nutrient grace.

Your mandibles glint

with a pa tent lea ther sheen, over legs

thick and magnificent.

Your touch could crush me to a malformed ruin.

If I am not food lam useless to you.

If I am food, so be it; this is your planet.

But remember: I did not step

where I could ha ve, when the tables were turned.

And your kind was beautiful to my sight
and I was not afraid. On the Late Late Show
the bugs died, by ray gun or, at station break,
insecticide — as alien in my native soil
as I am here. Such things were not my doing.

And so I ask of you —

If you need to kill me, then kill me.

But do not make me era wl first.

— ABO —

March/April 1988 PAGE 55

Stranger

< Continued from page 7)

Matthews came back shortly after daybreak. He
stood in the doorway outlined against the whiteness of
the mountains, shaking snow off his boots.

“Boy, it’s cold!” he exclaimed. He slammed the
door, throwing the bolt home. “I thought I’d look
around a little, so I went up the slope. ”

Jon studied the shaggy face. Matthews’ brown
eyes were narrow. They peered at him carefully, as
though holding something back.

“I think I’m going to move on,” Matthews said.
“You’ve been great to let me stay, but I better be on
my way.”

Jon smiled. “The storm,” he said softly.

“It’s not that bad now. It’s cold, sure, but I can get
to that cabin up the way. Twenty kilometers should be
easy. After that, I’ll sit it out a day if I have to, then on
to Isafjordur.”

Jon barely heard what he said. A deep, quiet part
of his mind was laying out alternative futures. One
future had Matthews going to Isafjordur, then to
Reykjavik. When he told the authorities what he had
seen on the mountain, the scientists would come, with
their trucks and their equipment. They would spread
out over the Eagle’s Beak taking pictures and
frightening the animals. The world would come in.

But there was another future. One in which Mat-
thews did not go on to Isafjordur, and the scientists
never came. That future could happen, as long as he
was more careful the next time. Jon knew now that he
should never have let Matthews into the house.
Everything led remorselessly from that one mistake.

The rifle had not been fired in years, but Jon kept
it clean. He took it down from its rack and opened it,
pushing a single shell into the chamber before snapp-
ing it shut.

“What’re you doing?” Matthews asked. His eyes
flicked back and forth between Jon and the gun.

“I will walk partway with you,” Jon said. “To
make sure you are on the right path.”

“What’s the gun for? ”

Jon never took his eyes off the boy. “Protection.
As you say, this is wild, lonely country.” He paused. “I
thought you wanted to leave? ”

“Yes.” Matthews went into Einar’s room and
returned with his backpack, still breathing hard from
the exertion of his descent of the ridge. He unzipped
the pack and took out his gloves.

‘ ‘What did you see up there? ” Jon asked.

Matthews refused to look up. “Wreckage. Looks
like a plane went down there once. A big one. When’d
that happen, during the war? ”

Yes . During the war . ”

Jon was holding the gun so that the barrel pointed
almost casually at Matthews’ midsection. But the gun
seemed to strengthen Matthews rather than scare
him. “That ‘plane’ had no markings,” he said, scowl-
ing. “And the metal was still smooth. I chipped off
some of the ice and could see myself reflected in the
wing.”

“Goon.”

“There were bones, too. Large, funny shaped.”
He stopped, faced Jon. “Look, are you taunting me?
Or don’t you know what that is up there? ”

“We are wasting time,” Jon said, the gun cradled
under his arm. He walked toward the door. “Come.
Before the storm gets worse. ’ ’

But Matthews would have none of it. “Those bones
aren’t human. They’re shaped wrong. And they’re
way too big.”

“Not human,” Jon said quietly.

“And you just let it sit up there? You don’t tell
anybody?”

“Sometimes I think how far from home it was.”
Jon threw the bolt and stared out into daylight. The
valley opened wide, gaping to remotest north. “And
how far from home we all are. All of us strangers.”

By the time Jon returned, the snow had stopped
and a hard, bitter wind scoured the valley. The gun
barrel stank of burnt powder, just as it had that night
forty years ago. The smell filled the room. Jon opened
the door briefly, but the scent would not dissipate. It
lingered far into the morning.

Things change their shapes in the northwest fjord
country. That afternoon Jon went out to see about the
sheep. Their water trough had frozen over. As he bent
over it to chip out the ice, he could see his own form
reflected, distorted by the crystalline surface into
something no longer human. He paused, wiping off the
top of the ice with his glove. It was as if a strange
creature peered at him from within the deeps,
pleading with him across a vast and inconsolable gulf.

Jon raised the hammer.

PAGE 56

March/April 1988

— ABO —

A Message From
Our Alien Publisher

The Wilkes-Barre Encounter

Ryan has made a photograph
of me. He caught up to me at an
automobile salvage facility near
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. I
was in the anuran configuration,
due to reconfigure in another
month, so the picture is of no real
value, to him or anyone else.

In addition, my gamma
surspirations overexposed his
photographic film, and what he
got appeared to be a blurry pic-
ture of a short person wearing an
ill-made frog suit. It is no better
than your average Loch Ness
monster photo.

I had gone to Wilkes-Barre to
relax and reflect on the human
situation. If you avoid the work
crews, a junkyard is a quiet
place. Acres and acres of in-
animate automobiles: roofs flat-
tened, their glass in shards, they
rest unshod, fractured, hemor-
rhaging upholstery, redolent of
rust and burning rubber, caked
with a gritty dust. It reminds me
very much of home.

I found a deserted pathway,
surrounded on two sides by stacks
of mashed Dodge Volare station
wagons. Hopping up out of the
cinders to a more-or-less ser-
viceable tailgate, I lit a cigarette
and pushed my hat down over one
eye. When I raised the nictitating
membrane of my other eye
against a swirling dust cloud, my
vision was impaired momentari-
ly. I heard cinders crunching
underfoot, a heavy, mechanical
clicking, and the whir of a tiny
electric motor. I opened my eye
and looked down to find Ryan
gazing up at me, camera in hand.

“I need the picture for ABO,”
he said. ABO is the nickname he
uses for the science fiction maga-
zine he “edits” from my field
reports.

I didn’t stay around to talk
with him. I hopped away.

PAGE 58

He went to a lot of trouble to
get that photograph, but then he
is a human being. Convinced that
a portrait says something mean-
ingful about me, he has turned his
fuzzy photo over to one of his
imaginative artists for a
“rendering,” which he now prints
beside my covering message in
his magazine. Why would he want
to publish a picture of one of my
86 configurations? As I say, he is
a human being. It colors his view
of things.

A human being lives his en-
tire life in the body he was born
with. Yes, it grows here and there
to accommodate his burgeoning
spirit. It hardens in some places
and softens in others in accor-
dance with the demands he
makes on it, gains hair, loses
hair, grows, shrinks, and changes
color, but (barring serious acci-
dent), a human body travels
through life in the same basic
shape in which it began. No lar-
val, pupal, or intermediary
stages. This fixed body shape en-
courages human beings to define
themselves in terms of the little
prisons in which they live their
lives.

I am attaching the text of a
book called Thinner Thighs in
Thirty Days, annual reports for
the last five years from the
Department of Water and Sewers
of the City of Rocky Flats, a book
called The Sure-Fire Job Chang-
ing System, The Complete Guide
to Inexpensive Home Improve-
ments, the owner’s manuals for
three different makes of
videocassette recorders, the
report of the United States Census
Bureau for the major metropoli-
tan areas, and an assortment of
short fiction and poetry. Do you
see what I mean?

If not, consider the
technology of hearing aids.

March/April 1988

Human beings have produced a
range of devices for enhancing
and clarifying sound in order to
help them overcome hearing im-
pairments. But virtually all the
energy and investment in the de-
velopment of these devices has
been channeled into making them
more cosmetic, rather than bet-
ter. The users of hearing aids
routinely tolerate feedback
squeals, tinny sound quality, and
intermittent effectiveness, but
they usually look pretty good by
human standards. It is not that
human beings are incapable of
producing hearing aids that work
well; it’s just that none of them is
willing to walk around wearing
something that is obviously hear-
ing equipment.

Then there is the lawyer with
athetosis. The disease is a variant
of cerebral palsy, and it disabled
her from birth. By the time she
was a teen-ager, however, she
had learned to live with it and had
become quite functional. At that
point her family moved to a met-
ropolitan area, where she was
given access to sophisticated
medical care. A well-known or-
thopedist evaluated her ungainly
gait, watched the way her right
leg turned in, and prescribed
surgery to sever the adductor
muscle. This, he felt, would cause
the leg to turn back the way it
should.

The successful surgery turn-
ed her leg back the way it was
supposed to be and substantially
reduced the speed and effec-
tiveness of her walk, (all at the
cost of a great deal of physical

pain). It is the essence of human
medicine (as with most other
human undertakings) to pursue
normality, even at the expense of
functionality. You will doubtless
find this idea of normality hard to
understand at first, and I am not
entirely sure I can explain it
anyway.

The human being lives his
whole life as the same organism
and therefore considers the or-
ganism to be the extent of
himself. This is his identity. He

Boomerangs

( Continued from page 31 )

only people who want his services are
governments, corporations and that
ilk.

There goes modern civilization.
(Er, I’ve got a whole bunch of doodads
in my garage. Wha t ’ll you give me for
them? — Ed.)

Unless a simple-to-carry, other-
wise useless, standard is used to ex-
change goods and services. Enter
money, in all its various forms.

(Plastic credit cards are intrin-
sically valuable, as well. They work
real well to open locked doors.)

However, rituals such as the stock
market crash are still a puzzle to me.
Maybe it has to do with vows of pover-
ty, or modern flagellation?

I dunno. I’ve always thought we
humans are a bit ’tetched anyway.

Sincerely,

A (restless) native

Dear Mr. Ryan,

I just finished reading the Nov-
Dec. issue and, on the whole, I liked it.
But I do have a bone to pick with Dar-
rell Schweitzer on his review of
Robert Heinlein’s book To Sail
Beyond The Sunset .

In the review, he calls Heinlein’s
earlier books I Will Fear No Evil a
“disaster” and Time Enough For
Love “stupefying,” at least in part.
While Schweitzer is careful to point
out all such reviews are subjective,
not objective, his problems with
Heinlein’s perennial tendency to talk
about how he thinks people should
live, react to politics, morality, etc. do
bother me. Personally, I think the two
books mentioned above are much bet-
ter than the later ones Heinlein writes
that revolve around mixing in char-
acters from his other novels.

But the thing I’ve liked about
Heinlein through twenty-five years of
reading him is that he does two things
well — first, he entertains and second,
his stories are always thought-
provoking, they always encourage
you to challenge the accepted dogmas
of the day. To me, those are the
hallmarks of a writer, not a
polemicist.

has no other. When our great phi-
losopher, Rana Catesbeiana,
showed us that every person is a
system, of which the organism is
only a part, he gave us a great gift
and liberated us from many of the
concerns that plague human be-
ings. The actual essence of a
human life, that network of
aspirations, obligations, rela-
tionships, beliefs, encumbrances,
values, liabilities, and influence,
is considered by these creatures
to be transitory, where the body is

Schweitzer has problems with
Heinlein’s attitude on sex (“sexual
mores are a matter of individual re-
sponsibility” — but aren’t they
always?), his characters are “utterly
untouched by the Christian values of
compassion and charity” (the whole
point of Time Enough For Love was
Lazarus Long’s wrestling with the
selfishness of suicide, and finding out
he needed to live for others), his “pa-
triotic jingoism” (well, it is true peo-
ple are trying to break into our coun-
try, not out of it as with the Soviet
Union), and other attitudes I would
suspect he’d see as “unreconstructed
libertarianism.”

Fine. Variety is the spice of life. I
don’t mind that Heinlein is too
“jingoistic” to be “in” these days
with some parts of our society that in-
sist on wanting to see the world as
they wish it were, rather than as it is.
I do patiently urge Mr. Schweitzer to
judge any author’s novel on its own
merits, rather than in a “guilty by
association” litany of commentary
that’s peripheral to the novel being
reviewed. I’ve only sold two novels,
with the first due out next summer,
and I hope whatever trade journals
review them do so with a little more
distance between the work and the
writer’s personal views. I liked Mr.
Schweitzer’s comments on the other
books he reviewed, but it seems as if
Heinlein sets off a certain reaction.
Too bad.

Among the stories you ran, I liked
especially “Scout’s Honor” by Joanne
Mitchell. While I can’t buy the idea
that some interstellar “league” would
want to waste its resources and time
trying to enforce a “fence the humans
in” policy if we somehow didn’t
“measure up” to their idea of civi-
lized, I did like the characterization,
the plot, and the tongue-in-cheek reso-
lution. Bravo, Mrs. Mitchell.

Best wishes,

T. Jackson King

Bend, OR

Dear Charles Ryan and the Rest of the
Tribe,

Whatever you are doing to make
ABO so damn good, keep it up! Keep it
up with the fine writers and artists
who fill your pages with such beauty.
Keep it up with the book and movie

March/April 1988

permanent. You see, it is a view
precisely opposite from ours.

Of course they are tyrannized
by this assumption, but it is so
fundamental to their outlook that
they don’t realize it. I am some-
times overwhelmed with sym-
pathy for them in their limita-
tions. Sometimes there is nothing
I can do but repair to a good
junkyard. If only Ryan would
leave me alone.

— ABO —

reviews and the author/artist bios.
And definitely keep it up with the edi-
torial policy that gives ABO the flavor
that reminds me of the old days with
Galileo (but alas, one cannot live in
the past).

The Alien Publisher does not need
a name, as he is unique. Humans only
need names because there are five
billion-plus of us crowded on this orb
and names are more expedient than
calling each other Hey-You. Even if
you were to hang a handle on the poor
guy (like I.M.A. Shyfellow) it would
not decrease the mail he gets ad-
dressed to “Resident,” “Occupant,”
or“Boxholder.”

Please send me both your writer’s
and artist’s guidelines. ABO is one
game I’ve got to get in on.

Aboriginally Yours,

J.B. Neumann

San Francisco, CA

Dear Mr. Ryan and staff,

I am not a person who ordinarily
writes to magazines or to anyone for
that matter. However, I felt so good
after reading the latest issue (Nov./
Dec. 1987) of ABO that I wanted to tell
you how much I enjoyed it.

First of all, I really like the new
format. It’s easy to carry, easy to
store, and it looks sharp! (Even
sharper, now that it 's slick. — Ed. )

Secondly, your choice of story
content has continued to delight me. I
never know what to expect, (except
for some of the best SF anywhere),
and, therefore, I’m always pleasantly
surprised at what I find between
ABO’ s covers.

Finally, your November-
December issue contained the best
surprise yet! I am referring to Mr.
Ryan’s encouraging advice to novice
SF writers. Being a novice myself, I
found this editorial (“On Becoming a
Writer”) to be just the kind of en-
couragement a writer needs. After
all, writers meet with enough rejec-
tion without hearing an editor tell
them “Don’t bother — we’re too
busy!”

As a result, I am requesting a
copy of your writer’s guidelines. I
have enclosed a self-addressed,
stamped envelope for your conve-
nience.

PAGE 59

Once again, thank you for your
encouragement, and keep up the good
work!

Respectfully,

JayS. Kingston

Warwick, RI

To whom it may concern :

I bought and read your magazine
for the first time (Issue #7) recently. I
found that it was the magazine I’d
been looking for. I love science fiction
and here it is — a magazine devoted to
it. Imagine that!

Well anyway, so now I’ve decided
I want all your back issues. Yes, all of
them, Nos. 1-6 and here’s a check.
Keep up the good work. ( Now there’s
a smart subscriber. Those back issues
will probably be worth millions (of
something) someday. — Ed . )

Rose Barger

Washington, D.C.

Dear Charlie,

I seldom reply to book reviews,
but then I’ve seldom seen one as
shallow and hurtful as Janice Eisen’s
review of Ether Ore, by H.C. Turk.

If all that your reviewer saw in
Ether Ore was puns, then she ought to
be given a seeing-eye dog and a cupful
of pencils and sent out to ply her natu-
ral trade. And for a reviewer to stop
reading halfway through the book (I
suspect it was after only a few pages,
actually) is a cheat: the reviewer’s
responsibility is to read the book;
otherwise she is taking money under
false pretenses. Especially a novel by
a new writer!

Had your reviewer some depth of
intellect and even a slight measure of
wit, she would have seen that Turk is
an original stylist — something that
happens so rarely in this field that we
should treasure each such appear-
ance. She might also have detected a
truly affecting story about a willful
young lady who comes of age by
meeting and conquering some (liter-
ally) bone-crushing adversity. But
she never read that far.

She has done a cruel disservice to
H.C. Turk — and to those of your
readers who will be turned off Ether
Ore by her slapdash review.

In fury,

Ben Bova

West Hartford, CT

( Dear Ben, as long as I’ve known
you, you have always been a gentle-
man, so I was a tad surprised that you
chose to attack the reviewer, rather
than disagree with the review —
which you, or anyone should feel free
to do. Book reviews express the opi-
nion of the reviewer on an issue of
taste. And intelligent people can differ
in their tastes. As the former editor of
Analog and Omni, I know you know
that. Actually, I didn't see the review
as a negative one per se. In fact, I
suspect those readers who like puns
will rush to the stores to get a copy,

PAGE 60

and if there’s more in it for them, so
much the better.— Ed.)

Dear Mr. Ryan,

I am enclosing a check for my
subscription renewal, at the in-
telligent rate. I was lucky enough to
see your ad in time for my original
subscription to include the first issue.
I have enjoyed every issue since.

I just finished reading issue #8.
The new paper improves the look of
the art work. I particularly liked the
interior illustration (By Bob Eg-
gleton, who also did the cover. —Ed. )
for “Solo for Concert Grand” (by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch). I may be a
bit biased, though, I also thought the
story was the best in the issue. Every
issue has had one story which edged a
little above the others, for me. In issue
#7, though, I could not make up my
mind between “Scout’s Honor” (By
Joanne Mitchell) and “What Brothers
Are For” (By Patricia Anthony) .

I do have one small complaint. It
is not something which would keep me
from renewing (obviously, since I am
renewing). It is something you might
consider for the future, though. When
issue #8 arrived there were nicks and
tears all around the three open edges
of the magazine. This never happened
with the stiffer paper you used before.
If you intend to stay with the new
paper, you may have to start mailing
in a wrapper. (See “Editor’s Notes. ”
-Ed.)

Already waiting for the next one,

Jim Anderson

Springfield, IL

Dear Mr. Ryan,

Like many others, I find your
publication to be excellent. The new
format with the slick pages indicates
that you are going places. The stories
you are printing are wonderful and I
am sure you have found some great
new authors. Keep up the good work !

The only complaint I have at this
time is that the address label on the
cover destroys the art work of the
cover. How about using a label that
comes off the paper leaving no resi-
due or tearing? ( Analog uses such a
label.) Thank you for an excellent
magazine.

Sincerely yours,

Forrest A. Rhoads

Newport Beach, CA

( How about a baggie? — See my
editor’s notes in this issue. The paper
is actually more expensive, but
slightly less bulky than the paper we
used before. And, since we went
through so much trouble to make ABO
the best-looking magazine in the field,
we decided to bag it to give it a
fighting chance in its trip through the
mails. No more labels on the cover
art. —Ed.)

Dear Alien Publisher :

The urge to renew my subscrip-
tion became positively resistible when
March/April 1988

your editor said he agreed with Mr.
Vaughan that tots and teens should be
barred from libraries. I got hooked on
Science Fiction fifty years ago, IN
THE LIBRARY. I’ve been helping to
support jerks like these ever since.
( The Editor said nothing of the kind.
Our Aborigines’ columnist did.— Ed . )
I raised three children who were
making trips to the library as soon as
they could walk. My two grandchil-
dren, ages four and seven, go to the
library weekly, and the seven-year
old is just finishing a program that
required her to read twenty books.

This country has a serious litera-
cy problem; if these yahoos want
somebody around to read their trash
in fifteen years they’d better both go
down on their knees and lead a pre-
kindergarten story hour at the local
public library. (If you wish your con-
cerns to be taken seriously, you
should avoid ad hominem comments.
Mr. Vaughan and Ms. Lucas aren't
“ jerks’ ’ or “yahoos’’. I suspect that if
you had thought for a moment or two
you would have realized they were re-
ferring to undisciplined children who
use the library as a playground,
rather than youngsters there to read
or study. Like you, I also got hooked
early and I made much use of the
local library. Children should be en-
couraged to use the library, but they
should be encouraged to use it for the
correct purpose. — Ed. )

Betty Sullivan Noak
Cincinnati, OH

Dear Mr. Ryan:

Please enter my order for one
copy of Starry Messenger: the Best of
Galileo. A check in the amount of
$11.00 is enclosed. Please incribe my
book as follows :

“To Rick Hauptmann,

“Words alone cannot express the
deep gratitude I feel for the years of
guidance, advice and direction you
have provided me. Your patience dur-
ing those times when I have strayed
from the path you so carefully
designed by thoroughly evaluating
my strengths and weaknesses, is one
of the myriad virtues you possess
which continue to amaze me.
Everything that I am today, I owe to
you. I pray that you will continue to be
there when I need you, while at the
same time I know that your incredible
philanthropy would prohibit you from
any other course of action. Again,
thanks for being you.

“Yours in Campbell,

“Is/ Charles C. Ryan”

-OR-

“Thanks for the ten bucks. ’ ’

Please feel free to choose the in-
scription you feel best suits your true
thoughts about me. (Depending on
which alternate reality you inhabit,
they’re both true — anyhow thanks for
the ten bucks. — Ed. )

Sincerely,

R. Alan Hauptmann
Clovis, NM

— ABO —

The Pat Morrissey Project presents a
set of 10 truly unique Science Fiction/Fantasy
photo prints. Each unusual reproduction is
hand signed and numbered in a limited edition
of 100. These colorful matted prints will be the
perfect gift for the avid Science Fiction/Fantasy
collector. For more information and a peek at
the rest of the set, send to:

T* .

The Pat Morrissey Project
47 High Street
Gardner, MA 01440

LEFT: Chronometry

More Art On Page 64

The ABO Art Gallery

The ABO Art Gallery is your chance to
obtain a glossy print of one or more of our
covers which is as crisp and sharp as the
original artwork, a crispness and clarity
that we simply cannot deliver on the
printed cover of the magazine.

These covers are big. Most of them are
11 by 14 inches and are mounted and mat-
ted, ready for framing at $35 each.

For more information, or to order
prints, please write to:

The ABO Art Gallery
c/o Aboriginal SF
P.0. Box 2449
Woburn. MA 01888

March/April 1988 PAGE 61

Sunshine Delight

( Continued from page 29)

“I... I go with you.”

‘ ‘Are you all having a problem? ’ ’

One by one, the elderly folk of Sunshine Delight
shook their heads and turned back to their rooms,
moping as though already bereft of yet another of
their friends.

*** *** ***

At Maud’s insistence, the cab let them out a block
from the theater. They stepped into the neon day-
bright center city, the static electricity crush of hun-
dreds of bodies urgently moving who-knew-where to
the thudding beat of the young people’s “Crash
Music” blaring from scores of pocket “fi’s”: the whiz
of cymbal sizzle, the migrainous pounding of elec-
tronobasses, the atonal whine of tortured electric
bouzoukis. Above it all churned the symphony of a
thousand electric motors: cars and trucks spewing
ozone, which replaced the choking fumes of burning
gasoline as the predominant smell of central city life.
Lars shuddered, but Maud enjoyed her new curiosity
about the world she used to fear. Everyone shone
from a slight patina of perspiration, but the worst
were the sweaty young people dressed in their vinyls
and diffraction gratings, tasteless joke fetishes with
heavy makeup and tawdry baubles, revolving about
their heroes, the lead-faced veterans, who stood
against the concrete walls of Greater Phoenix, enjoy-
ing a respite of drug-induced catatonia. Curb-to-
building crowds pushed against the two old people.
They breasted the tide and slowly approached the
movie house.

In front of the ticket booth, Maud was jostled into
some of the bizarre people who had been staring
blankly at her faded Grateful Dead T-shirt.

“Watch it, grandma!” snarled one of the boys. He
raised his arm; it might have been intended as a
threat. Passers-by ignored him.

“Were you talking to me?”

“Yeah, lady. Don’t bump into me no more.”

Lars tugged at her arm. “Let’s go, Maud.”

Maud stared up into the boy’s eyes. “Are you go-
ing to hit an old lady?” she asked.

He sneered. “You never know.” His friends tit-
tered.

The crowds surged again, and Maud was knocked
off balance. She caught herself with her cane, but
bumped into the boy anyway.

“Look, I told you—”

Maud smiled at him, and a rosy flush suffused her
face. “You need a lesson in manners,” she said, and
brought the point of her cane down on his foot as hard
as she could.

The plastic boot was poor armor against the metal
tip of the umbrella. “You burned-out antiques!” the
boy yelped as he hopped backwards and fell to the
sidewalk. Lars pulled Maud away and into the theater.

“Fine thing, now they wait for us when we get out.
What’s with you, Maud? You been reading those
mysteries too much.”

She grinned at him. “I feel fine, dear. Popcorn?”

1 ‘The doctor said no salt—

PAGE 62

“Two medium popcorns,” Maud said to the girl
behind the Plexiglas counter. “One plain, one with ex-
tra salt and butter.”

*** *** ***

The movie had already started. The plot didn’t
matter, as Sylvester was just as beautiful as ever.
Single-handedly he reconquered the Falkland Islands
from the Argentine villains, deltoids and biceps rippl-
ing as cartridge cases flew out of his machine gun.
Halfway through the movie, Lars noticed how Maud
seemed to lean forward during the combat episodes,
and munched her popcorn when Sylvester groped the
Italian actress. Her whole attitude seemed strange,

different. It was very disturbing.

*** *** ***

They sat for a moment in fluorescent light as the
theater emptied.

“He’s so lovely,” Maud said. “I used to date a
body builder. Of course, that was a long time ago.”

Lars regarded her. “Overnight you not afraid of
anything. It’s like you ain’t the same person as
yesterday.”

“Nonsense! I’m just not ready to give up, that’s
all.”

“Those sleaze-balls wait for us out there.”

Maud laughed. “So does a taxi. Let’s go.”

Two hours had changed neither the noise nor the
energy of the crowds. Traffic crept down the one-way
street. Lars, firmly holding Maud’s arm, attempted to
guide her toward the curb, but halfway down the
block, a surge of human pressure plunged them into
an alley separating two buildings. The tide pushed
along the sidewalk, but here, in the quieter dark, a
single shimmering Crash chord exploded up twenty
concrete stories into the night. They turned to see a
half dozen street people staring at them, grouped
around a tall man with a shaven forehead and long
hair down his back. His pasty-white skin accentuated
the hollows of his unmoving eyes.

Lars, unable to take his eyes from the veteran,
reached blindly for Maud to pull her away.

“Mr. Sparkhead, I believe,” Maud said. The
young people laughed, a humorless sound.

“You’re the lady that fell down.”

“Yes, I am. Thank you again for helping me.”

“You hurt my friend. ’ ’

Maud smiled. “Well, not very bad, I’m sure. He
said he was going to hit me. He actually raised his
hand to me, can you imagine that? ”

“You hurt my friend.”

“Maud,” Lars shouted, “we get out of here now.”
He gripped Maud’s elbow with his arm and wheeled
her around.

Sparkhead was there in an instant.

“Don’t grab the old lady. She said she don’t want
to be grabbed.” A huge muscular fist encircled Lars’
forearm.

“Get your hands off me, sleaze-ball! ” He punched
the wirehead in the chest.

The impact turned him on like an electric switch.
Sparkhead ripped the old man away from Maud,
threw him against the wall, and held him there, heels
a few inches above the asphalt, with a hand against his
throat.

March/April 1988

“You gonna take me on, man? I show you.” He
cocked back a fist, and punched at Lars’ face.

“No!” screamed Maud, swinging her cane. The
gang leapt up as the gnarled wood slammed into the
nape of Sparkhead’s neck.

It was enough. Sparkhead dropped Lars, who
folded up on the ground, and the punch struck con-
crete. But Sparkhead never felt the fractures. With a
long, high-pitched cry, he fell stiffly backward, violent
spasms racking his body, his face contorted in random
twitches and grimaces. His teeth came down hard on
his tongue; blood poured into the alley. The young
people were appalled. Lars and Maud, however, had
seen grand mal seizures before.

“Lars, are you all right?”

He pulled himself to his feet. “Yah, I’ll be fine.”
He rubbed his neck, looked down at his attacker. “You
hit him a good one.”

The seizure evidently reached his rectum and
bladder, and continued unabated. “I think I hit him in
his wires,” Maud said. She reached her arm out, and
Lars took it. “God, that felt good.”

Lars looked at her, not sure if he heard her cor-
rectly. Then he shrugged. “One, Two, Three, What are
we waiting for?” he sang, leading her into the crowds
moving along the thoroughfare. This time, they had no
trouble getting to the sidewalk, hailing a cab, and get-
ting home.

*** *** ***

“You’re back!”

“Oh, we were so worried ! ”

“Where have you been? ’ ’

Lars smiled. “Get a paper tomorrow.”

“Dear friends. The movie was great fun. There’s
nothing to be alarmed about.” But it took twenty
minutes of Maud’s reassurance before the last of the
residents of Sunshine Delight were able to get to bed.

Lars regarded his friend. “I don’t know what’s
gotten into you,” he said. Maud smiled as he added, “I
feel less afraid now, too. Well, I go to bed.”

“Just a minute, Lars. I bought you a little present.
Will you open it tonight? Before the girl comes in the
morning?”

The long, thin package in the hall closet weighed
close to ten pounds. Lars grinned as he pulled the
polished walnut from the box and ran his fingers over
the blued steel.

“It’s twelve gauge,” said Maud. “Want to come
out with me tomorrow and look for some sleaze-
balls?”

— ABO —

To Be An Auk

< Continued from page 13)

Then the first shark bounded up free. Sarah slap-
ped it firmly, half to show she was healthy and domi-
nant and too much trouble to eat, half almost playful-
ly. “Go on now, I’ve got others to take care of.”

It made a strange sound and then leapt away, its
body making a joyful arc as it danced at the interface
of air and water. It could not have understood her, of

course. But I noticed that it danced well away from
the frightened flock of auks.

“You too,” she said to me. “Go on, get out of here.
You don’t have to trust me. I realize now that that’s
beyond you. No matter how much I do for those birds,
they’ll always be yours. Just yours. No one else could
possibly care enough—” Her voice trembled for a
moment. “So go on with your birds. Take them on
ahead. I’ll catch up when I’m done down here.”

I said nothing. I hadn’t quite digested what I had
just seen. So I climbed in my raft and headed out. The
auks, given the choice, followed me. It was hard to
persuade them to stay on the beach where I left them.
I had to sit with them awhile, let them drop off to
sleep.

Then I slipped away to rejoin Sarah. There was a

lot of work to get done before the night was through.

*** *** ***

“A ghost net,” she said, much later. “That’s what
they call them. Old gill nets made of some non-
biodegradeable plastic ... they don’t know they’re
lost; they don’t know it’s time to stop fishing. People
sometimes see them far offshore, tangled around the
bodies of whales.”

I shivered. But the horror was already fading. The
auks were gamboling on their winter island, their
mouths opening like flowers whenever the interviewer
from the news team picked up a fish. “Those birds are
still too friendly,” I said.

“According to the records, great auks were
always too friendly for their own good,” Sarah
replied. “But maybe we’ll deserve it this time. Have
you seen the mail yet?”

I looked at her. She handed me a fat packet of let-
ters that I hadn’t asked anyone to save for us. “Volun-
teers,” she whispered. “Looks like there’s going to be
people willing to help your birds get where they’re go-
ing as long as they need it.”

I held the letters in my hand, amazed. Slowly, I
shook my head. They’ll forget, I thought. They’ll get
bored. It isn’t possible that they’d really go through all
that’s required.

Then I looked at Sarah standing there, and it oc-
curred to me at last that she’d been there every step of
the way. I saw again the flash of her knife, the auks
leaping free. The shark leaping free. Inside my chest,
then, something leapt too, just a little, as I realized
that maybe I didn’t have to carry the burden for the
whole human species alone after all. “Maybe you’re
right,” I said. “Maybe I’m going to have to stop call-
ing those birds ‘mine.’ ”

Sarah smiled, and I found myself moving toward
her, my stiff arms opening awkwardly to hug her to
my chest.

— ABO —

March/April 1988

PAGE 63

Covers for Your Walls

ABOH

The ABO Art Gallery

The ABO Art Gallery is your chance to
obtain a glossy print of one or more of our
covers which is as crisp and sharp as the
original artwork, a crispness and clarity
that we simply cannot deliver on the
printed cover of the magazine.

These covers are big. Most of them are
11 by 14 inches and are mounted and mat-
ted, ready for framing at $35 each.

For more information, or to order
prints, please write to:

The ABO Art Gallery
c/o Aboriginal SF
P.O. Box 2449
Woburn, MA 01888

5

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